
RnnI, ■ VI n A- 

Copyright IN" . 



COPW?rGHT DEPOSre 



THE HUMAN WAY 



BY 



LOUISE COLLIER WILLCOX 

'I 




HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

M C M I X 






Copyright, 1909, by Harper & Brothers. 

All rii^hts reserved. 
Published September, 1909. 



n A 246749 
SEP 20 1909 



^ 



arg lEllxB 

August 19th. 1908 

^a sxnt m\in Unt lifie mnrtif, an ttttm0rti;g offmttg 

*' Wi^/^ j'O^ a part of me hath passed away; 
For in the peopled forest of my mind 
A tree made leafless hy this wintry wind 
Shall never don again its green array. 
Chapel and fireside, country road and bay. 
Have something of their friendliness resigned; 
Another if I would I could not find, 
And I am grown much older in a day. 
But yet I treasure in my memory 
Your gift of charity, your mellow ease, 
And the dear honor of your amity; 
For these once mine, my life is rich in these. 
And I scarce know which part may greater be- 
What I keep of you or you rob from me.'' 

— George Santayana 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

Introduction — The Decoration of Life ... i 

I. The Service of Books 19 

II. Out-of-doors 48 

III. The Children 8^ 

IV. Friendship 109 

V. Human Relations . 130 

VI. The Area of the Personality 158 

VII. The Hidden Life 194 

VIII. Solitude 222 

IX. Memorat Memoria 250 

X. Detachment 284 



THE HUMAN WAY 



THE HUMAN WAY 

INTRODUCTION 
THE DECORATION OF LIFE 

AS childhood passes and the youthful flow of 
I the blood and the eager outlook upon life 
slacken, the thoughtful are apt to see themselves 
endowed with a stretch of time somewhat and 
and bare of decoration. Life's main punctuation 
points are unexhilarating tasks, requiring repeti- 
tion at regular intervals. 

Who cannot remember the shock with which 
youth first faced this personal share in existence, 
and noted with a certain nausea of despair the hor- 
rible discrepancy between desire and fulfilment? 
Our possessions, our powers, our vigour are insuf- 
ficient to meet the demands laid upon them, and 
we realise that we begin to live by accepting an in- 
curable deficiency. Our very thoughts are frag- 
mentary and broken, and our guesses pitifully 



THE HUMAN WAY 



frail in the vast face of the Sphinx. We examine 
ourselves, and question what it all means and what 
is worth while, and the most fortunate among us are 
perhaps not those who find a facile answer. To 
most of us answers come slowly, by discipline rather 
than by inspiration; and the struggle is long before 
a reconciliation is reached. 

But once he sincerely faces the truth that the 
universe is not set swinging to his tune, nor the 
interwoven tracks of the star-orbits drawn after 
his pattern, the wise man lays aside the clamouring 
desires of youth and looks about for means to 
decorate this bare and shivering bit of personal 
life ; he searches for a garment of worth and dignity 
to wrap it round. No brave man accepts failure 
as an ultimate solution. Somehow, each one of us 
must press out of experience a result which, if it 
is not victory, is, at any rate, appeasement. 

It is a new stage in development, however, when 
we turn to take stock of what decorations are at- 
tainable for the naked life we hold. By some 
strange inborn blindness to values we see the realms 
of the possible painfully meagre and unattractive. 
With the slow, strained eyes of disappointment we 
look at life, and, little by little, new values detach 
themselves and stand out for us. We find in the 
place of the easy pomps and powers we had hoped 



THE TASK OF DECORATION 

for, the world, responsive to prolonged effort and 
courage, presenting us, in return for our trouble, 
the joys of seeing and thinking and the rewards 
of disciplined feeling. The ancient way of rec- 
onciliation, the one-time religious attitude, has 
undergone great changes in modem times. The 
instruction to accept life as incurably evil, and to 
bear the cross as a test of submission, has changed 
into a counsel which makes for looking at life as 
mere rough but plastic material out of which a 
man must mould a successful figure. We no longer 
passively endure evil with patience, but actively 
we seize upon it and transform it. Surely there is 
less of defeat in this modem method. It is a call, 
not to submit, but to gird up one's loins and act 
and beget results. 

That we enter life with an endowment of little 
more than blind desire is a truism. We want, at 
first, food, then physical comfort, then, bit by bit, 
what we see, and later what we hear and read of 
and desire creates thought. Out of the blind im- 
pulse to have comes the habit of recognising, plan- 
ning, contriving means to better the culture of the 
imagination, wisdom to find in some mental shel- 
ter a life that partially, at least, satisfies us. And 
slowly but inevitably with the years thought 
creates form in the visible world. Our thoughts 

3 



THE HUMAN WAY 



may be weak, ineffectual thoughts that draw lines 
in the face and make the shoulders stoop, the eyes 
shift ; they may mark out a certain round of tasks 
daily completed, books kept or gardens planted; 
they may build railroad systems, or lay cables, or 
discover continents, or grope through untracked 
historic periods; they may build, or paint, or write 
poetry; but for good or for evil, for better or for 
worse, almost imperceptible or world-pervading, 
thoughts decorate existence with tangible forms. 
Thought, which is rich and productive, or self- 
centred and confined, as a man furnishes it with 
data to work upon, moulds the life. We can feed 
it upon the thoughts of other men or we can hearken 
to the wind of the spirit that blows as it lists. We 
can choose to live with the profoundest spirits who 
have been, or to feed on the casual and the hap- 
hazard, but we have to face the fact that ultimately 
our choice will body itself forth and face us ; it will 
be as definite a form, as inextinguishable a factor 
of reaUty, as we ourselves are. 

So it comes to seem but the short-sightedness of 
youth that wailed over limited scope for effort or 
an uncongenial atmosphere; for whatever atmos- 
phere we desire and think about, we make; and 
whatever ideal we hold, we create ; and only those 
who dream fitfully fail to make their dreams come 

4 



BOOKS AS GUIDES 



true. To come slowly to this realisation is to accept 
no outlook as final. The transformation of what 
is naked and ugly into what is clothed and fair is 
the constant exercise of living, and in itself is ex- 
hilarating and liberating. 

The most natural refuge of disappointed youth 
is the life with books. There we find, to our heart- 
ening, the solutions of the problems of those who 
have lived before us.' There are no difficulties we 
have to face which have not, in some sort, already 
been coped with. To know in one's first discour- 
agement that splendid army of thinkers and work- 
ers who have moulded life to its present propor- 
tions, who have refused to be beaten back by the 
odds against them, and who, even in the last gasps 
of the warfare, continued to note, for the benefit 
of those who were to follow, the ebb and flow, the 
gain and loss, the new grip and final assault upon 
life, this is to grasp fresh courage and to take new 
hold upon living. It is to come to see that there 
is never a moment so long as we breathe when all 
that we can do is done. Ever there is a task ahead, 
and if no other, we can set down the honest account 
of our own failure; we can even, perhaps, add to 
the grace and beauty of life by leaving a fair and 
clear account. This task, in itself, is a liberator 
for the discouraged soul. About us lie the victo- 

5 



THE HUMAN WAY 



rious annals of other fighters who would not be 
content to die without multiplying visible forms, 
without translating crude emotion into intellect- 
ually wrought lines. 

The visible world, too, is often thrown open to 
people by books ; and once the wonder and beauty 
of mere seeing and hearing made known to us, it 
would be difficult indeed to find life utterly bar- 
ren. ** For a hundred men that can talk, there is 
one who can think,'' said John Ruskin, in one of 
his high-handed and sweeping generalities; **and 
for a thousand who can think, there is one that can 
see." To learn to see and to hear, to be initiated 
into the wonder and beauty, the infinitely curious 
and painstaking finish of the outer world, is to 
break open windows in the prison of the self and 
let in the healing light. Whether we trace geo- 
metrical patterns in the tiny enamelled faces of 
the flowers or on the wings of the myriad-hued 
insects, whether we rest the sight upon the curves 
of snow-capped mountain ranges or follow the fig- 
ures of the starry constellations, the trained senses 
are a means of escape; a way out of the torturing 
confinement of a narrow egoism. 

It is wonderful, considering the sameness of the 
shapes and sizes of our eyes and our ears, the great 
difference in our original capacities to see and 

6 



THE TRAINED SENSES 



hear! A whistle of quick vibrations was recently 
used as an experiment in a lecture on the mega- 
phone, and while some of the audience found the 
sound excruciatingly shrill and painful, a large 
part of the audience heard nothing at all. In a 
park where an average man recently asserted that 
there were no birds at all, or at best a few English 
sparrows, a naturalist, after two days' observation, 
counted two hundred different kinds of birds. 
For capacity yields to training, and to walk with 
a huntsman through a forest is to hear the whole 
wood alive and vocal where we had moved before 
in stolid indifference, hearing nothing; to walk 
with the painter over his daily round is to see 
Jones's barn and Smith's stock -yard suddenly 
decorated with undreamed-of detail, with shadows 
and colours and values and jagged skylines; to sit 
out at night with the star-lover is to find the floor 
of heaven studded with intricate geometrical fig- 
ures, wheeling their gold and fire about between the 
awful coal-sacks of the interstellar spaces; and 
to turn from the vastness of the heavens and set 
the eye to the microscope is to become aware of 
the same wonder of skill, the same mystery of per- 
fection in the jointure of a spider's leg as in the 
swinging of the stars along their orbits. 

Beside the world of records, thought, and trained 

7 



THE HUMAN WAY 



perceptions, nearer to us, even, than the visible 
beauty of the outward, concrete world, lies the 
whole range of human relations to work upon. 
Here, again, is a realm in which defeat is easy and 
victory is hard. It would even seem at times that 
the nearer earth the temperament, the less in- 
structed and the more naive, the easier it is to 
enter into comforting and easy relations with men. 
The more complex and difficult natures, those who 
make high and strenuous demands, have their own 
sorrows in the matter of comradeship and friend- 
ship. Probably the list of real friends decreases in 
number in exact ratio to the loftiness of the char- 
acter. But surely none will close life's score with- 
out the memory of certain human relations which 
not only count for steady solace, but which have 
been, even if intermittently, sources of vivid delight 
and personal enlargement. 

Closer yet, and more accessible, there lies ever 
about us all the constant renewing, the dawning 
life with its fresh possibilities, the hopeful realm of 
childhood. It is difficult to understand those who 
profess to love their kind and yet fail to love little 
children. It is not only the beautiful bloom and 
the freshness of children, but it is their great new 
chance that is so inspiring; it is the unwritten 
tablet of the childish mind which is so delightful in 

8 



CHILDHOOD 



the midst of the great fatigue of much living and 
its baffling frustrations; it is the value of the un- 
trammelled and unprejudiced thinking of the new- 
comer which makes a little child precious and fair 
beyond the capacity of any grown person. The 
grown man is valued for the scars and wounds of 
battle, but only about childhood do we see the 
trailing clouds of a serenity and innocence belong- 
ing to a purer clime than ours. If, for past sins, 
they are incarnate here, as some dare speculate, 
they yet bear about them the marks of large and 
heavenly memories, and a charitable providence is 
slow to initiate them into the more sordid values, 
the more tarnished conditions of this earth. Even 
when a child enters life in the meanest, the sloven- 
liest of human surroundings, even when self-defense 
and overreaching are inculcated with the use of 
his little legs and tongue, how detached and how 
innocent, how apart and untainted the childhood 
of him still appears ; he seems to us to be imitating, 
indeed, but yet holding his heart apart, uncon- 
cerned and unmoved by his own actions. 

For the sake of childhood, too, if for no other, 
we work at the adjustment of human relations. 
We extend the new hope to the new generation, 
we pardon this whole world of fragmentary beings 
about us, and set ourselves to lifting the human 

9 



THE HUMAN WAY 



conditions and, wherever we can, to keeping them 
fair and acceptable. Wherever a home receives a 
child into it the stirring of the physical life brings 
with it some spiritual regeneration, some regret for 
past lapses, some new courage for better living. 

Books, then, and the outer world, friends, chil- 
dren, and the general human relations seem to 
be the first, the more elementary, external, and 
graspable decorations of life. They are the pass- 
ageways only to the inner decoration, to the delib- 
erate and wilful stretching of the area of the per- 
sonality, the forcing of selfish interest to let go 
while one reaches out over the whole of the con- 
ceived world, identifying one's self with all life, 
beautifying, inspiring, controlling the secret places 
of the soul, the thoughts and desires of the silence, 
till even dreams and visions shall add their share 
to the great reconciliation. Then, the threshold 
once passed, since no growth begun can ever utter- 
ly stop, the higher forms of life begin of their own 
apparent initiative to yield up their meanings. 
Poetry will have a new and a vital significance, 
religious symbols will convey their essence, we shall 
dare to scan our past and make festivals out of the 
memories of its sacred moments, and the solitude 
wherein we meet ourselves alone will finally be- 
come as a chamber of quiet and appeasement, 

lO 



THE BEAUTY OF THE PASSING HOUR 

There is a great deal of theory of life afloat nowa- 
days, and as one moves about in the world one is 
continually being introduced to new panaceas, new 
ways of making this little trip of mortality worth 
while. As a matter of fact, wisdom is as old as the 
ages. All that can be said about life, by and 
large, has been said and repeated and reiterated, 
but men will rarely take wisdom at second hand. 
Each man not only does repeat the history of the 
world in his person, but he insists upon doing it. 
You may caution the child a thousand times that 
hot things burn, but he never realises it until he 
is burned, and then he adds that little fact to his 
data of the indubitable truths of the world: too 
much heat burns. So it is, humanity goes stum- 
bling along toward wisdom; each generation par- 
tially repeating, with variations, the mistakes of 
the last, or changing them a little and inventing 
new errors. No close observer of life to-day but 
will see that the error of the average man now is 
in setting his whole faith on competition and 
wealth; instead of getting life out of a living, he 
is getting a living out of life. 

And yet the pageant of the world, the myriad- 
coloured flood of the hours, the unutterable beauty 
and glory of the changing aspects of the world as 
it wheels itself along through space, is a vision too 

II 



THE HUMAN WAY 



wonderful to barter for mere bread and meat and 
shelter. If it took as little time to convince men 
that money will not buy happiness as it does to 
teach the little child that fire burns, what a stride 
in progress would be made! If the man of moder- 
ate means could but realise that a multiplication 
of things will not advance him one step toward 
content, that all the things that are really worth 
while are free for the taking; and if we could 
make the rich man realise that his pomp is power- 
ful only in so far as he uses it for the good of all 
men, and that mere display is vulgar and mere 
luxury enfeebling, what a good work we should 
accomplish! Shall we do away with differing con- 
ditions? That were impossible, even if any with 
open eyes for life in all its colour and variety would 
be willing to reduce it to a mere drab, dreary uni- 
formity. But what we may accomplish is — so to 
increase the sympathetic understanding of all 
classes and kinds of men that rivalry may cease to 
impede progress, and the work of the world may 
be done for the joy of doing it, and the labour of the 
world may be so divided that each man shall live 
while he works, and work without blunting all his 
finer perceptions and swamping his keener, more 
delicate feelings, but literally combine his work with 
a heightening of his every power of enjoyment. 

12 



WHAT IS WORTH WHILE 

This is not a mere Utopian dream, but it is the 
step in progress toward which Western civiHsation 
has been stumbling through the centuries. Man 
has had to learn what his life is : he has had to learn, 
as the child learns that fire burns, that the thing 
that hangs beyond his reach and seems so desir- 
able, is not really all that it seems, and that once 
he has grasped it in his hands it is as like as not to 
crumble into dust and ashes. He has had to 
learn that when he pauses to look behind upon 
such a course, he will find there but a mad strain, 
a feverish anxiety, and in the present he will have 
gained but the bitterness of satiety. 

What is worth while, then? Is it worth while 
to spend a life in multiplying comforts and luxuries ? 
After all, to have the best of food and the best of 
drink and the finest shelter is to put one's self on the 
level of a well-stalled ox or horse. To accumulate 
money and property, to heap them up and guard 
them and keep them, is to degrade the intelligence 
to the level of the bee or the ant. All these things 
are good ; some of them are necessary. Food and 
drink and proper shelter, work and gain and in- 
crease of facilities are the by-products of living — 
they are necessary ; but who mistakes them for the 
Life itself must pay for his error as if it were a sin. 

And the Life itself ? Let me quote from a book 

13 



THE HUMAN WAY 



about the East : *' Of a sudden it came to him that 
life itself was beautiful. Not effort only, not work 
nor play, success, achievement, wealth or fame or 
honour, but life itself. To live was good. The 
hours, the golden hours, were not just empty spaces 
between two clock-beats to fill with acts. They 
were themselves a glory. To sit and let the crystal 
flood of time pass over him was purest pleasure. 
Not his life only, but all life was good. To feel the 
great and glorious stream of the world's life pass 
on, to be one with Nature and hear her sing. For 
she goes forward to music. It is not always a 
battle chant she moves to. In her song there are 
all things. The shout of triumph and the cry of 
those who fall are there; but there are also other 
notes — the ripple of the river on its stones, the 
murmur of the trees, the rhythm of the sap that 
rises in them, the thunder in the hills. It is the 
song of infinite harmonies." 

This is what comes upon us, with a misgiving 
that is almost a terror, when we pause to think that 
we stand here in the midst of mortal life and that 
we shall not pass this way again. Life is infinitely 
beautiful, and we, if we fail to find it so, must 
search for the defect, not around us nor outside 
us, but in ourselves. And if, in our chase for gross 
and material things, we have outrun the power to 

14 



THE HOLY CITY 



live, to perceive, to enjoy, we must pay the penalty, 
for Nature is inexorable; we pay for our mistakes 
to the last jot, just as we pay for our sins. 

But, after all, the outlook is not so black. Mis- 
takes may be the steps of the stairs up which we 
are climbing. Every time we recognise one for 
what it is, and call it a step instead of a goal, we 
move on. And this generation is just in the act of 
lifting up one foot off the step of materialism to a 
step that shall be better worth while. We shall 
stand next on a plane where we shall realise, as 
the child who has been burned realises what fire is, 
that life is not all in the body, that its happiness is 
not in bread and meat, nor yet is it sport, or gayety, 
or excitement, or rivalry, or prominence, but growth 
and enlargement. He is happy who sees more, 
who understands more, who effects more this year 
than last. He is happy who finds his perceptions 
sharpening, his powers increasing, his sympathies 
widening, his helpfulness broadening. He is hap- 
piest who includes most life in himself and radiates 
most life around him. 

There is still another, a final decoration of which 
we hear now and then, and of which, perhaps, occa- 
sionally, we have faint glimpses: it seems to be a 
secret chamber or a holy city; a sort of indescrib- 
able experience that means the cutting off of earthly 

IS 



THE HUMAN WAY 



ties, the finding one's self at last loosened from the 
clamour of desires, detached ; and— if one may trust, 
as surely one may, those who have passed before 
us upon the path — it is the final triumph over self : 
once this experience is reached, it is never quite 
lost again, and the fear of drowning in black de- 
spair is past forever. For the great life, of which 
we see ourselves a tiny atom like a foam-bubble on 
the sea, goes on, and our life is as the life of the 
sea, and it matters never a whit when and how the 
personal bubble bursts. The individual fate is a 
fragment; and in the great sum of life and light, 
desire dwindles, success and failure, happiness and 
unhappiness, foolish and small distinctions are 
swamped, and we triumph in the life eternal. For, 
in the end, it matters far less than we suppose, if 
I live or you live, since life itself, everlasting and 
imquenched, lives, and we are but a moment in 
life's eternal sea. 

So, out of the primitive impulse of desire with 
which we are born, grows the power to enjoy the 
wonders of creation and to accept life as it is, 
luminous with far-reaching interpretations, the 
power to offer ourselves bravely to the life of all 
the worlds. This frees us from the old-fashioned 
notion that life is mere trial and progress of death. 
It is much more nearly, as the Scotch catechism 

i6 



DEATH 



has put it: ''To glorify God and enjoy Him for- 
ever." It is to lay hold on the sense of eternity 
here and now, and in an ever-present abundance of 
life to do away with the sense of the past and the 
future, of the before and after, and accept the 
wonderful heritage of the moment. Not that all 
the intellectual curiosity in the world or the widest 
swathe of sympathy can free a man from pain. 
Pain is the slow process of the enlarging of the 
consciousness ; it is one of the constituent elements 
of life and knowledge, and these, as we know life 
now, would be less without it. It would be a vapid 
and insipid course across a plain if a man could 
pass through existence without suffering and with- 
out doubt. There is something in the original 
make-up of our kind that demands an element of 
precipitousness. If life is greatly worth while, it 
is not so because we can rely on the ultimate 
amiability of all things. The meaning of existence^ 
if beautiful, is, so far, beautifully severe. It is 
futile to try to carry the moon in our pockets or 
to aim at an easy perfection, but we can learn 
to play the game vigorously, realising that our 
thoughts are ultimately somewhat effective, and 
that to know ourselves an integral part of an end- 
less system and that endless system a part of us, is 
to decorate life with a fulness of joy and of pain 

17 



THE HUMAN WAY 



which rescues us from the only irremediable trag- 
edy : the tragedy of finding that the self ends with 
the self, and that our life has passed away as a 
tale that is not told. 

And how shall he face death who has grown to 
full stature in this life ? If, on this chance journey 
we call mortal life, he has not only found goodness 
and security and happiness, but has himself had 
power to create more goodness and more security 
and more happiness, shall he believe for an instant 
that all this can be blotted out of existence by a 
mere shadow called death ? '' Dying is hard, but 
death is easy," wrote a hero by a flickering camp 
light as he bled to death alone. The change, like 
all strange and new experiences, has its difficulties 
and pains, and then comes the new adventure, 
strange and thrilling; but may we not trust it to 
be gladder and greater than the experience we have 
just exhausted and cast behind us ? Death, what- 
ever else it is, is the next step onward. 



THE SERVICE OF BOOKS 

I HAVE spoken of books as being to the average 
man one of the easiest props to grasp at when 
once he has sincerely faced the fact that Hfe is not 
an ultimate satisfaction, built to his desire. Books 
are so steady, so secure, so silent ; they are so will- 
ing to give up their secrets for the asking and to 
show no embarrassing curiosity about us. We are 
saved confessing to them that life has failed us and 
that we are looking for a soothing balm. If, 
through the inexperience of youth, we fancied that 
life was dropped upon us from the skies, a finished 
and satisfactory product, we can turn to books 
without humiliating ourselves by saying that we 
have found it out, after all, to be but the roughest 
sort of raw material upon which we must try our 
strength. Considering how great the pain and the 
shock of this discovery of the discrepancy between 
expectation and reality, it is heartening to see how 
bravely men conduct themselves about it. It is 

19 



THE HUMAN WAY 



a fine and considerate convention whereby they 
conceal the gashes of warfare and present a cheer- 
ful and acceptable face to the dangers and mys- 
teries of the past and future, even though behind 
their backs, like guilty children with a stolen fruit, 
they hold the sense of all the thwartings and the 
buffetings of fate, the weakness and the incom- 
pleteness of the human equipment. After all, we 
feel it is a poor creature who would cry aloud on 
Fate or demand pity. For sincerely to face the 
fact that we are alone in the dark and need help is 
to recognise, too, the great army of mortals who 
are in the same plight. We see the reasonableness 
of cultivating thrift with the emotions, of collect- 
ing data and consulting those who, in the very 
teeth of the whistling winds of chance, have yet 
believed in and attained the unconquerable soul. 
We admit, to begin with, that always at the bot- 
tom of the cup there is the little heap of dregs, the 
dash of bitterness in each human experience, the 
rift in the sweetest lute, the slit in fortune's sack. 
Even he who seems most nearly to get his legitimate 
share of good must bow to the law of mutability. 
Disease, death, and decay surround us all, and let 
who will lay his hand upon his most blessed mo- 
ment to stay it, yet it shall vanish into thin air. 
Books have dealt more effectively, more grandly 

20 



EFFECTIVE COPING WITH FAILURE 

with failure than with success, with tragedy than 
with contentment. Not, probably, because sad- 
ness is braver than cheer, but because a great deal 
of good cheer is the mere flow of the blood after 
food and exercise ; it is the easy optimism of a big 
body and a blunted mind, and those of us who 
have looked long and honestly at life can only be 
consoled by those who have seen further into the 
depths than we have. Therefore it is that for one 
man who re-reads the Shakespearian comedies, 
there are a score who turn again and again to the 
Sonnets, to Lear and Hamlet , Macbeth and Othello, l 
for theory of life. From Jeremiah and the writer 
of Ecclesiastes down to the life-sickened Amiel it 
is the men who have seen deepest into the misery 
of human things who have consoled and fortified 
us. And it is only when we come to Browning's 
later work, to the great '' IV in La Saisiaz, that we 
forgive him his robust optimism. 

Perhaps we are too little inclined to give thanks 
for the present-day extension of comforts and sym- 
pathies to that great, wide-spreading body of pessi- 
mists and revoltes of the early nineteenth century. 
It was the outcry of writers like Heine and Leo- 
pardi, Shelley and Byron, Stendhal, Constant, 
Baudelaire, the army of the dissatisfied and the 
world-weary, who so pressed upon us the sense of 

21 



THE HUMAN WAY 



failure that it helped us to develop means of bet- 
tering life. 

''Help us/' we should say to our authors — "help 
us to know ourselves and to extend our powers." 
I Even the greatest suffering may be but the chance 
to extend being; for suffering, when it ceases to 
be merely personal and ignoble, is one of the swift- 
est initiators into consciousness. And to under- 
stand suffering, to cope with it, to turn it into the 
material of creation, we turn to books as the tools 
of thought. If we are, indeed, fragmentary and 
mutilated beings, yet we have the power of be- 
getting results in this concrete world which shall 
outlive our mortal span. They do not come as 
swiftly as we would; often they take us at un- 
awares, bearing little resemblance to our precon- 
ceived ideas, but yet the fact remains that we 
create, and that what we bring into the world obeys 
the natural law of increase and growth. 

A book is a small, palpable, tactual body in 
which a man has presented his threefold self of 
body, mind, and spirit for a wider circulation than 
he could otherwise compass. He sets himself down 
in black and white, clarifying while he belittles, 
squeezing the self into a narrow compass. He 
blackens the outlines and defines the limits of a 
fluid personality, for the easier perception of other 

22 



INITIATORS INTO CONSCIOUSNESS 

men. This makes it easier to find a man in his 
book than to know a man in his life. Literature 
is an incarnate statement, not only of the impulse 
of the moment — that strange and fleeting little 
entity we call the present — but of that to which 
the present belongs: the past of memory, the 
future of aspiration — the impulse which gathers 
up the whole of a man, past, present and to be, 
and sets it with its diminished body forth upon its 
travels. The worth of this convenient embodi- 
ment depends upon its truth, for its object is neither 
diversion nor yet instruction, but, as I have said, 
the enlargement of experience and the initiation 
into reality. The process of life is a gradual push- 
ing out of the boundaries of consciousness. How 
far can we see ? At first only the flickering candle 
a few inches off, then the bright-coloured ball a 
yard away, then the picture on the further wall of 
the room, and then we see from the window the 
horses in the street, and finally stars, moon and 
sun and cloud-shadows, or the fathomless spaces 
between the stars. 

Life is on so vast a scale that it is only toward 
the end of a long experience that we begin to 
catch something of its rhythm, and to feel in vague 
sort the measure to which we have marched. 
Books condense the rhythm of life. There we see 

23 



THE HUMAN WAY 



causes working themselves out into effects, and 
effects taking upon themselves the nature of fresh 
causes and begetting again more effects. Books, 
unlike real life, present themselves a finite whole, 
having beginning and end. .When we know all 
we can learn of a man there is sure to be an area 
we have never discovered, an immeasurable tract 
stretching off into the unseen infinity. But, book 
in hand, the condensed and solid personality made 
portable for our convenience, we may know its 
quality and its standing, its depth and its beauty. 
Books, again, present us with a measuring-rod. 
We know only by comparison, and as we gain more 
and more data for contemplation, we gauge more 
and more accurately ourselves and our powers and 
the life to which we stand related. So it is best 
not to be afraid of many and various books. Too 
many may cause a little mental indigestion, but 
we must accustom ourselves to assimilating much 
if we would be muscular and red-blooded. \ One of 
the tests of the mentally unsound is to try the 
breadth of the field of vision. The man who, with 
eyes fixed straight ahead, cannot see the object 
at the side, is the man whose nervous system is un- 
reliable. In mental life, equally, the test is the 
same. It is the fixed idea, the narrow, limited in- 
terest which denotes disease. " Wide and broad in- 

24 



OUR MEASURING-RODS 



terests endow with mental health, courage, and 
agility, and when for physical reasons it is difficult 
to broaden our interests by spanning the girth of 
the world, books furnish us with easy means of 
transport, with varied climates and temperamental 
reactions upon climate, and, above all, with various 
men, nations, and ideals. 

I once heard a great man state that any one who 
had the pluck and the perseverance might become 
an authority on any given subject. ''Just read on 
that topic from six to ten hours a day, and before 
you know it you will have mastered it.'' There 
is something encouraging and heartening about 
this for those who are cut off by circumstances 
from systematic education and guidance. The 
way may be less easy and less swift, but ultimately 
we may become master by mere perseverance— a 
quality any man may beckon to him if he will. 
Books, indeed, present us with our natural milieu. 
We can move on our own plane of consciousness. 
It is a vain subterfuge to say that we choose light 
and trifling literature to divert us after our plunges 
into profound meditation, and that we enjoy a 
book because our habitual thoughts are of so much 
higher tenor. We may, indeed, once or twice in 
a lifetime, read the work of an elementary intel- 
ligence to see what it is like, to add to our data of 

25 



THE HUMAN WAY 



human knowledge, but if we linger over such books 
the secret is out. It is because, somewhere or 
other, lurking hidden within us, is the same trifling 
and elementary mental habit, but half disenthralled 
and demanding nourishment. Never dream the 
law that like will to like can be broken through. 
We are what we read almost as much as we are 
what we think. When we express an opinion of a 
book we label ourselves. The romantic will hunt 
through books for romance, the historian for sta- 
tistics and facts, the statesman for policy and 
methods, the poet for beauty and ideals, and the 
philosopher for everything. We take from the 
author mainly the gift of our sleeping selves — 
some portion of us so quiescent we hardly recog- 
nise it till some one of the great band of embodiers 
brings it up to the rim of consciousness. We draw 
out a clearer, better-defined outline of our blurred 
and dim perceptions. After all, even in books, 
the statement holds true that we receive but what 
we give. Or at best, we receive what we are fitted 
to extract. 

At any rate, an industrious intercourse with 
good books helps to lift us above the mere life of 
convention, whereby we become as lifeless and as 
objectless as glimmering shadows on a wall. Their 
appeal is so insistent to the secret and mysterious 

26 



LEVELLING DOWN 



places of the consciousness, and is so much freer 
and fuller than any human appeal would dare to 
be. Books and nature, indeed, can risk calling 
continually for a sustained attention to the gravity 
and significance of this chance visit of the soul to 
mortal spaces. 

We run the risk, of course, of translating the 
higher into a lower atmosphere and misinterpret- 
ing. Doubtless no signal can save us here. The 
tendency to lower is easily seen in the way in which 
all religions have had to fall from the spiritual plane 
upon which they were offered to the dogma, ritual, 
and external forms which people demanded. We 
should bear in mind that whatever is truly great is 
never wholly known to us. A lifetime is short in 
which to reach after the whole meaning of the 
highest htnnan product; we must continually add 
to the fulness of our interpretation and deepen our 
sense of significance by living and growing, if we 
would stay ourselves at the pitfall and avoid drag- 
ging down with us a fragment of a great whole 
which dwells above us, eternally stable. 

Yes; books, with their services, have their dan- 
gers, and one of the greatest is that of using books 
as an opiate — a medicine for drugging ourselves 
and freeing ourselves of time. Life is pre-eminent- 
ly our chance for action, and to lie half asleep, 

27 



THE HUMAN WAY 



amused and diverted from ourselves by the actions 
and the passions of imaginary men, is to throw life 
away. Books must be to us a stimulus for more 
living and more thought, not an anaesthetic to put 
us to sleep. What we read must be translated into 
our daily course, into a fuller abundance of sig- 
nificance in the text of reality. An emotion per se, 
beginning and ending with the self, is futile; an 
emotion translated into action, bodied forth into 
the visible world as a new power, is calling into 
play the forces of eternity. To live in fancy alone 
is to suffer from the disease of Peer Gynt, who, 
led astray by his own imagination, never reached 
but one truth outside of himself. To paralyse 
ourselves with over-deliberation till doubt ties our 
hands and closes our lips, is to catch the disease of 
Hamlet and of Amiel, and usually without effecting, 
as they did, a great legacy to posterity, because 
they thought and translated feeling into the logical 
and concrete terms of the word. 

If books mean this much of outlet and enlarge- 
ment to the reader, how much more must they 
mean to their makers. To clothe one's thought 
and send it forth to work its will afar from the 
governing hand, is a strange and a wonderful crea- 
tive power ; and to do so greatly and effectively is 
granted only to the rarest, most blest among mor- 

28 



WISE THROUGH COMPASSION 

tals. The half of a phrase of a man of reflection 
often contains the germ of a whole system of 
philosophy or the foundation for a theory of con- 
duct. The vital difference between truly great 
books and the average lies just in this difference 
of depth of suggestion. Great books are un- 
fathomably suggestive. No one will ever reach 
to the end of the interpretation of the Gospels, 
the Upanishads, the Dhamma-Pada, of Epictetus, 
Plato, Plotinus. 

There is a school of literature and of art which 
urgently advocates experience as a means to con- 
sciousness. We are all brought face to face at 
times with a meagre humanity fed on and upheld 
by obedience to minor rules, and it is so easy to see 
the poverty of the merely convention-ridden that 
we find it difficult to answer the fallacy so spe- 
ciously presented that urges experience — any and 
every experience rather than an anaemic con- 
sciousness of life. It is just to this question that 
Wagner replied when he put the power of healing 
into the hand of him only who is a guileless fool, 
wise through compassion. There is one kind of 
man in the world who can dare to be unsophisti- 
cated, and that is the man who lives for far issues. 
Nor is his a narrow experience of life, for with eyes 
' unblinded by desire, such man looks toward the 

29 



THE HUMAN WAY 



goal of the race; turning from himself he knows 
the struggles and stifferings of humanity, not by- 
trying them, not by falling down and rising up 
worn and weakened, but by imagination, by in- 
sight and sympathy, and this while he still has 
the reserve strength to give out and to heal. 
Such men, whether saints or authors or artists, 
have a single aim. They try no by-paths, they 
move straight up, they have the simple-minded- 
ness, the guilelessness, the single purpose of crea- 
tors. It is the power of genius and of sanctity 
alike to know by intuition. A certain writer said 
of Parsifal that his ''only achievements were the 
shooting of a swan and the refusal of a kiss." But 
the mind sees what the mind brings with it to see. 
There are those who never reach beyond the ges- 
tures of the body, and who might hear the opera 
a dozen times and yet never know that Parsifal 
destroyed a whole world of false and lying entice- 
ments, that he recovered and liberated a sinning 
soul, that he healed a lifelong agony, and himself 
attained through renunciation to the ecstatic vision. 
It is possible to reduce the highest spiritual vic- 
tories to the paltriest statement of concrete fact, 
so closely is all life interwoven. The danger of a 
meagre humanity lies not in a lack of experience 
but in a lack of feeling. The recent biographies 

30 



THE BOOK AND THE AUTHOR 

of Pater show a career markedly lacking in events, 
and when the life of one of the first geniuses of this 
era is written, it will probably be found that he 
was born and grew up in the suburbs of a Flemish 
town, diligently digging in his garden or sitting in 
his room writing books. The lives of Charlotte 
and Emily Bronte seem to have been a round of 
lowly household tasks, diversified by lonely wan- 
derings over the Yorkshire moors. But shall any 
one dream that the consciousness of these people 
was meagre? It is most often out of the depths 
of the stillness that worthy thoughts flow. 

The author, if his book be worth anything at all, 
is the man who feels a little more, thinks a little 
deeper than other men, and out of the surplus of 
consciousness sends forth definite statements. The 
gift of giving out life is not a casual, slight, and 
happy turn for using words; it is the power to 
absorb more life, it is the rich and quick response 
to any stimuli, till out of the stored abundance 
new life breaks forth. 

Of course, one must take into account that it is 
part of authorship for the writer to give you his 
best, his most collected moments. The substance 
of a man's work doubtless expresses his preoccu- 
pations and convictions; but, alas! intention bears 
often a remote relationship to daily practice, and 

31 



THE HUMAN WAY 



we are all more or less in the plight of Portia when 
she said: ''I can easier teach twenty what were 
good to be done than be one of the twenty to follow 
mine own teaching." The temperament of high 
ideals is apt to be tensely strung, and there are 
extra pitfalls put in the path of intense natures. 
So when one says that the sum of virtue in a man's 
work is the same as the sum of virtue in himself — 
an undeniable truth — ^there is something much 
more subtle meant than that he who praises tran- 
quillity possesses his own soul. He may quite sin- 
cerely and naturally praise it, because he does not 
possess his own soul, and thinks how pleasant it 
would be if he did. Watts, for example, is not a 
more moral man than Turner because he painted 
Faith and Hope and Love Triumphant, while Tur- 
ner painted light and atmosphere. That difference 
merely means that Watts looked at his universe 
through the medium of ethical ideals, while Turner 
interpreted life in terms of architectural line and 
coloured light. One way is as intrinsically moral as 
the other. One even wonders a little, sometimes, 
if that impersonal morality, which is so utterly 
unpreoccupied with itself, so unconcerned with its 
own existence and name, and so given over to pure 
and disinterested contemplation of beauty, is not 
a degree higher. It is, perhaps, in a way, a little 

32 



LIFE'S DEEP SECRETS 



flaw to be so righteous-minded as to have virtue 
ever in mind and on the lips. Leonardo was quite 
as virtuous a painter as Holman Hunt, though 
he never labelled a picture nor tagged a moral. 
But he looked closely and curiously into the nature 
of things, and there is no taint of meanness, 
no ignoble smirch upon the strange, subtle, inac- 
cessible, smiling faces he set upon canvas. ''You 
must depict your figures with gestures which will 
show what the figure has in his mind, otherwise 
your art will not be praiseworthy. No figure will 
be admirable if the gesture which expresses the 
passion of the soul is not visible in it. The most 
admirable figure is that which best expresses the 
passion of the mind.'' Thus Leonardo warns his 
disciples, and there are spirituality and depth of 
emotion and strenuous virtue in the caution, al- 
though there is no word of right and wrong. A 
man's direct utterance may belie him, but he com- 
municates himself in every act, in every glance, 
in despite of himself. He is always, whatever he 
is doing, communicating himself. 

This, after all, is the beauty of life: that its 
meanings lie deep — deep. We may be obvious 
platitudinarians, but Life does not unclose her 
secrets to a flippant gazer. If we believe in an- 
other's virtues it is not because he can utter elo- 
3 33 



THE HUMAN WAY 



quent sentences about goodness at all, but because 
there is something convincing in the lines of his 
body, in his choice of words, or the cunning with 
which he shapes his sentence; it is the look in his 
eyes, the corners of his lips when he smiles, or the 
confidence he withholds, which inspire our faith. 
A man may smile and smile and be a villain — meet 
it is we set it down; he may talk and write about 
virtue till he is exhausted ; he may spend his days 
extolling disinterested goodness, and yet what he 
is will somehow peep over his shoulder or lurk 
hidden in his words and contradict him so loudly 
we can hardly hear his voice. Words will not de- 
ceive the close observer of life. A tiny girl of 
seven, of introspective habit and keen intuitions, 
who herself had some difficulty in practising geni- 
ality, heard a petted prima donna much praised 
because she was not only great in her chosen art, 
but was also so gracious and so good, and com- 
mented: *'It isn't that she's so good; it is just 
that she smiles and pats people. I guess she was 
taught to keep smiling and patting when she was 
young." 

One may have an excellent intellectual concep- 
tion of what virtue is and not be virtuous ; one may 
even be emotionally obsessed by the idea of right- 
eousness, but to such it is only promised that they 

34 



WRITING AND BEING 



shall be filled; and, strange contradiction, one may 
be born brave, honest, faithful, tolerant, and long- 
suffering, and yet be unable to utter a syllable in 
honour of the virtues. So, after all, if what an 
author gives us is the measure of his intellectual 
power, it is rarely the demonstration of his whole 
nature. His moral being will, indeed, be in his 
work, but it is to be found under the words and 
between the lines in the strength and the patience 
and the sweetness, or the force and the sincerity 
and the truth, that wrought the outer garment. 

In one of his letters Lewis Nettleship speaks of 
understanding why it was that Christ and Socrates 
wrote nothing. It is true that the greatest per- 
sonalities have always relied exclusively upon being 
to interpret them to the world rather than upon 
words. For words in their definite way confine 
and narrow down personality, which is by its 
nature fluid and limitless, nor can they ever wholly 
convey the man who utters them. Even at its 
highest, art suggests rather than states, and the 
worth of a poem, a statue, a symphony, is mainly 
that it may gain new powers and new beauties by 
the added significance which changing generations 
of men infuse. 

To the author himself his trade must often come 
to seem what Goethe called it, ''a busy idleness*'; 

35 



THE HUMAN WAY 



Stevenson laughingly compares it to the trade of 
filles-de-joie^ in that it must either please or fail- 
in fact, address itself to the multitude or drop into 
the silence. Keats, too, that great apostle of pure 
beauty, who, beyond other poets, loved the mere 
sensuous sound of words, had his moments when 
fame and love ''to nothingness do sink/' All the 
great poets have been moved to indite paeans to 
Death, and, doubtless, some of the fervour and the 
eloquence of Browning's Prospice, Whitman's Comey 
Lovely and Soothing Death, Tennyson's Sunset and 
Evening Star, and Swinburne's Hymn to Proser- 
pine are due to the weariness and reaction from 
the trade of multiplying words. Writers have toj 
I submit to moments when they are half -paralysed 1 
by the haunting sense of the uselessness of utter- 
ance, when the only alluring passage seems to lie \ 
through the door that leads into the infinite silence, i 
To set partial interpretations and tentative mean- 
ings spinning their course through the world; to 
add noise and bustle and trouble; to multiply 
words and compress into form the half-glimpses 
of truth that beset us; to ply with uninspired in- 
dustry for small returns the trade of setting ex- 
perience and emotion into words — ^is, at times, a 
weary and a disheartening business, and who has 
once chosen it shall meet, without doubt, his 

36 



THE WRITER'S DISCOURAGEMENTS 

gloomy hours when the whole matter shall seem 
but a futile and stupid ''busy idleness/' 

It is, then, that a writer must force himself to 
play out his cards to the end of the game with ali 
the skill he can muster, whether he be winning or 
losing. For the author, as for all men, the game of 
life, the getting the better of destiny, justifies itself 
by the strength and the skill it educes. His task is, 
after all, the task of humanity at large : to keep the 
senses alive and healthy, to keep the perceptions 
alert and true, to react swiftly and cannily to the 
stimuli of the outer world, and, above all, to main- 
tain some kind of working harmony between the 
intellect and the spirit. For, more than other 
men's, it is his task to keep ever in mind that the 
intellect unaided cannot tell us the whole story of 
life, and that the less known powers of the spirit, 
the intuitions, the faiths, the enthusiasms, have 
their own justification. A clergyman who had lis- 
tened to a long argument upon the decay of the 
churches and their small importance in modern 
life, responded quietly: ''But there will always be 
some people in the world who need help to say 
their prayers!'* Just as there will always be some 
people in need of the church's aid and ministration, 
so the author, in his moments of discouragement, 
may lay it to heart that there will always be some 

37 



THE HUMAN WAY 



to lean upon the written word; some to whom 
books and writing are the main props of loneliness, 
the means of stimulating thought and increasing 
consciousness. 

Whether or not, as Stevenson says, the writer's 
case must be judged by his power of pleasing, is an 
open question. It is a truism that he who writes 
for his own generation renounces the next. The 
author of universal appeal is a moon among stars. 
Tennyson spoke to the thought of his own day and 
then fell back, while Browning, Swinburne, Mere- 
dith, who had appealed to the future, stepped for- 
ward into public appreciation. On commencing 
author, then, this question of conformity or self- 
confidence must always be faced. People, as a 
rule, do not read to learn new thoughts, but to find 
their own prepossessions and tastes confirmed. To 
every young writer there comes the temptation to 
fall in with prevailing views and to keep silence 
when he cannot, but this is to win a cheap and 
easy success. And though to fight for one's own 
point of view means to be haunted every now and 
then with the awful question of the worth or worth- 
lessness of an individual standpoint, one must still I 
face the music and refuse to be a straggler on the] 
march. 

An author's value depends largely upon his in- 

38 



THE WRITER^S RENUNCIATIONS 

dependence of spirit and his power to think ahead 
of other men. He must either possess the power 
to Uve alone among men, or he must actually, 
physically, dwell apart. He must live bounded by 
the two great silences — ^the silent and hidden pro- 
cesses of nature on the one hand, and the inexorable 
and inscrutable reserve of the Beyond on the other. 
For the life of an author demands great power of 
self-sustainment, and not only must the physical 
senses be sharpened and kept alert to all the 
phenomena of nature, but that other side of man's 
being which moves in the vast spaces of the in- 
tangible and the immeasurable must be exercised 
and kept imaginatively alert. 

When we have developed philosopher farmers 
like Levin in Anna Karenina we shall have more 
poets and more great writers; for certainly such 
a life offers the strongest enticement to the imagi- 
nations of poets and philosophers. The riot of 
delicate colour in the early spring, and the gradual 
revival of nature's vocal life, the sense of ex- 
pectancy in the stretch of February hills when the 
whole landscape might be sketched in sepia and 
white, the shut-in season of the winter when the 
world is asleep and the householder may send his 
own thoughts far afield into the ages and the dis- 
tances, the slow, soundless, uninterrupted flow of 

39 



THE HUMAN WAY 



hours wherein to read and think, the dropping veil 
of twiHght through long, sleepy afternoons, the 
chant of frogs and locusts after dark, the steady 
drip of autumnal rains and the blazing death and 
fall of the leaves — all these are the natural heritage 
of the man of thought. It was such a life that 
Montaigne led on the little estate that bears his 
name in the province of Perigord. He boasted 
that, though he lived through the most troublous 
and warlike times in the history of France, and 
his house was open at all times to all parties, such 
w^as the candour of his life and the peaceableness 
of his pursuits, that he remained throughout un- 
molested and unsuspected. 

It may seem strange to say that in an age gen- 
erally looked upon as commercial, bustling, noisy, 
the spirit of the times is voiced most definitely in 
a literature of acquiescence, of reflection and quiet. 
There is nothing new under the sun, and there has 
never been an age since the beginning of writing 
that has not produced books of this same order, 
but never before have such books been so numer- 
ous, so widely read, so influential. It would al- 
most seem as if the bustle, the noise, the greed, the 
haste, the competition, were justified by the beauty 
of the body of admonition they have called forth. 

A generation or so earlier the tone of censure was 

40 



HUMAN SOLIDARITY 



entirely dififerent: rebuke was more petulant and 
vehement and less hopeful. One has but to com- 
pare the utterances of Carlyle and Ruskin with 
those of Maeterlinck and the modern mystics to 
note the introduction of patience and hopefulness 
in the counsels of perfection. The new tone is not 
that of the patronising master, as of one who 
should say: *'I, indeed, have conquered life — 
listen while I explain it all, and learn of me how to 
act your part''; it is, rather, an admission of the 
solidarity of life, of the unity of souls. The whole 
illusion of separateness means pain, and only as we 
rid ourselves of it do we approach virtue and hap- 
piness. We suffer, indeed, not because some one 
outside ourselves inflicts suffering, but because the 
habit of our thought involves suffering. But the 
writers who teach this doctrine no longer reach 
down from a height of perfection to us ; they say : 
'*I am even as you; share with me all I have 
known"; but if, by chance, they voice the truest 
spirit of the age, they say: ''I am you; let us ac- 
knowledge this, and share our consciousness." 

''AH men, even the saints," says a modern 
mystic, *'are interested in their own affairs; so 
the right and wrong of it come to be matters of 
the scope of self, the reach of self, the depth and 
breadth and height of self's affairs. 'Which now 

41 



THE HUMAN WAY 



was neighbour to him that fell among thieves ?* I 
have grown to be neighbour and to have the neigh- 
bourly heart toward him only over whom I have 
learned to stretch my shield of ownership, and to 
make real and living for me with the warmth of 
interest I feel in that which I call mine; to other 
men I am cold; they are theirs and somebody's, 
they are not mine." It is the spirit of our age to 
feel that neighbourliness must stretch as far as the 
whole girth of the world, and that all mankind is 
not only mine but me. Whitman, perhaps, carried 
this feeling further than any other, and with him 
it was less, too, an intellectual conviction than 
an innate perception. He felt it; with strange, 
mysterious thrills he felt his bondage to all men — 
to men past and men to be : 

"It avails not, neither time nor place — distance avails 

not — 
I am with you, you men and women of a generation or 

ever so many generations hence; 
I project myself — also I return — I am with you and 

know how it is. 
I, too, felt the curious, abrupt questionings stir within 

me. 

That seems to be the human discovery beginning 
to voice itself here and there in the latter half of 
the nineteenth century, and singing itself aloud 

42 



A NEW FORM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 

from the whole choir in the new century — the song 
of the identity of human experience, the solidarity 
of the human soul. There are, too, signs that the 
different kind of consciousness is like to bring forth 
new forms of art. Metrical and rhymed language 
can hardly pass beyond the point of suppleness and 
intricacy attained by Mr. Swinburne. But there 
may be a new form, less regular, less confined by 
rules, more free of utterance, richer, more suited 
to the complexity of modem thought, which shall 
tally somewhat with the changes taking place in 
modern music, where, slowly but surely, the dia- 
tonic harmony is being laid aside for a hyper- 
chromatic basis of composition — the so-called genre 
omnitonique. 

In speaking of new forms of consciousness, one 
is taking, perhaps, too optimistic a stand ; yet it is 
certain that supreme genius cannot be totally un- 
related to the humanity of which it is but an ad- 
vance-guard. If, figuratively speaking, the genius 
stands on the shoulders of humanity and interprets 
life from the wider vision given by that height, 
that is all one can expect of him. Soaring into the 
air, he must, by nature's laws of gravity, fall. He 
is bound to keep up some sort of relation to his 
kind. Shelley, insisting upon living as though all 
men were already angels, lost hold upon the prac- 

43 



THE HUMAN WAY 



tical moral order leading toward an earthly para- 
dise. It is impossible to bound back into the 
Garden of Eden. It no longer lies in the valley 
behind, but has been translated into a richer, a 
fuller, a more inconceivably beautiful heaven, to 
which we climb along the rugged mountain-side of 
deeper consciousness and deeper renunciations. It 
is possible, then, that all the modern multiplica- 
tion of comforts, all the mechanical devices for 
making the physical life easy and negligible, is 
just that moment in progress when humanity is 
standing level, preparatory to a great united move- 
ment upward. Once on the higher step, we shall 
lift our greatest man on our shoulders again and 
hear a truth from him that reaches farther out 
into the starry spheres of the spiritual life than 
any we have had heretofore. For the genius is 
but the culminating flower of humanity, and he 
comes to the birth where for many generations 
quiet virtue and striving intelligence have been at 
work. 

A great point to keep at heart is that all our 
present-day multiplication of mechanical comfort 
loses its meaning when it is used to complicate the 
physical life and draw our attention off to physical 
enjoyments, whereas its value may be incalculable 
if it so simplifies and diminishes the necessary at- 

44 



LIFE MORE THAN BOOKS 

tention to physical needs as to leave the mind more 
and more free for spiritual pursuits. It is difficult 
to conceive of creation as other than the struggles 
of spiritual beings to come to higher and fuller 
consciousness. And this tmity of human endeavour 
the writer of to-day needs to hold very close at 
heart, for it is being ever more and more emphati- 
cally stated. Indeed, in its various forms, it seems 
the great affirmation of our present century toward 
which the past has steadily worked, that divisions 
are stupid and negligible misconceptions; that 
progress is one movement of all humanity, not the 
separate jaunt of a sect or a party; that we are, 
in very fact, our brother's keeper, and that his sins 
are never so many or so great that we can cease 
to be responsible for them; that the evil in the 
world is, to the end, our evil, belonging to us as 
we belong to it. This feeling of the affinity in all 
things the writer of to-day must grasp if he would 
stand away from the two worst enemies of life 
and literature — vulgarity and mean-spirit edness. 
There is an uplifting solemnity, too, in the least 
task of vso great a work as the unification of hu- 
man endeavour, so that to *' sweep a room as for 
thy laws '' may partake of sublimity. 

*' Social justice as the controlling force in the 
development of political institutions, social effi- 

45 



THE HUMAN WAY 



ciency as the goal of education, universal sympathy 
with life as the guiding principle of literature and 
art — this is a triad of uplifting motives which can- 
not help stimulating every constructive energy/' 
writes a modern philosopher. To apprehend this 
current in the world's thought is a task not to be 
overlooked by a writer of to-day ; nor can he afford 
to forget, through timidity or self -depreciation, 
that however small his task, he, too, is in *'the 
proud and calm procession of eternal things." 

It is a great story, this story of life, and full of 
hard and deep meanings, and never dull so long 
as we keep up our questioning. For the answers 
of life are full of contradictions, and its pain is 
often joy, and its curses blessing, and its blackest 
night the sun, and its greatest event the stillness, 
and each man to live must be his own slayer. 
Life never shows us any trite little tale we can 
read straight off and forget — a tale with a nice 
obvious conclusion, with the good folk all dressed 
in white and listening to wedding-bells and the 
bad folk all ugly and dark and sent off into cor- 
ners for weeping and gnashing of teeth. That is 
the little fiction we tell each other because it's as 
high as our intelligence has climbed, to like to 
label things and pretend we know something con- 
clusive. But the purpose of life is evidently not 

46 



LIFE'S PURPOSES 



to amuse or divert us ; it is not easy, not obvious, 
not even pleasant in the ordinary acceptation of 
the term. It would seem to have in hand the 
making of us into something utterly different from 
what we now are ; it would seem to be teaching us 
that all things are enchained and intertwined and 
indissolubly bound together, and with the smile 
of the Sphinx, Life looks at us and dazzles us, and 
with the claws of the Sphinx she grips into us and 
warns us against making facile answers to her 
riddles. 



II 

OUT-OF-DOORS 

THE world is large in proportion as we enter 
it with a capacity for emotion. Few kinds of 
feeling return so rich a reward as a highly culti- 
vated love of appearances. The first impulse of 
civilisation is to beautify. When primitive man 
established himself in a cave and finished making 
stone knives and hatchets for self-protection, the 
first-fruits of his leisure were the drawings on the 
walls of the cave. He demanded beauty in his 
surroundings. It is to-day the mark of progress 
from the pure savage that a man becomes atten- 
tive to the decorations of his life, and a keen per- 
ception and a skilled practice in this matter of 
seeing is one of the most powerful means to the 
extension of the personality. Desire limits — it is 
a process of dragging what one wants into one's 
self ; but love and perception extend — these push 
out the barriers of the self and endow with elas- 
ticity and power of wide reach. 

48 



THE WORLD OF PERCEPTION 

Touch and taste unaided by the imagination 
remain imprisoned in the sphere of the body. 
Smell, despite its priority in associational value 
and its stimulative effect upon the imagination, 
has a limited reach, but vision and hearing extend 
indefinitely beyond the body. The joys of seeing 
and hearing — these lift us out of ourselves and in- 
tensify our relation to the visible universe in all 
its vast extension and its unplummetted depths. 
To stretch the realms in which we see and hear is 
no childish impulse; indeed, the love of the beauty 
in the world, the power of seeing it, the impersonal 
joy it gives, is apt to come to a man when the life 
of desire is failing. The personal life of need and 
greed blinds; it limits the vision to the thing we 
hope to get ; but let a man grow beyond his wants 
and a new and wonderful universe is spread out 
before him. 

Since beauty is the sensation in us of a pure and 
disinterested delight regarded as the quality of an 
external object, the more we dwell in such sensa- 
tions, the more will they grow in keenness, quick- 
ness, and intensity ; the eye will perceive more and 
more of delicate shades of beauty, become more 
and more alert to line and colour, and the ear will 
awake to the vaguer waverings and vibrations in 
the air. And even as morality the sense of power 
4 49 



THE HUMAN WAY 



in obedience is a contribution to the worth of life, 
so the cultivated perceptions make their own 
valuable contribution to the charm and dignity 
of existence. 

It is a strange sensation to cross the sand-dunes 
at night with an average workman and realise 
that his entire self is concentrated on bad walk- 
ing, the approaching fall of night, and the desire 
for comfortable shelter, while to the observer these 
are all the merest side-issues, hardly apparent, 
and every sense is aroused to delight. Nature is 
calling into play the whole being at once. We 
feel the great wash of the scented air, blown clean 
across sea spaces, slapping against our skin; we 
taste the salt in our pores, and we smell, rising up 
with the dark from the pale stretch of dune or 
purple patches of furze, the odour of the earth; 
the silence, punctuated by distant sounds, deli- 
cate and faint, claims the ear; through its pulsing 
we catch the mournful lapping of the sea, the faint 
whispering of the evening breeze preparing to 
blow, the far-away chorus of the frogs. An inlet 
of the ocean spreads to one side a little space of 
water, very still, yet glistening somewhat in the 
dusk. The sky, deep and dark and infinitely far 
overhead, blends toward the horizon with a glow 
of pale primrose, shot up on the trail of a setting 

SO 



ACROSS THE SAND-DUNES 

sun, and against this splash of pallor the deep 
green pines toss their tufted tops. The planet 
Venus appears on the edge between the light of 
the western slope and the depth of the central cone, 
and mirrors herself brokenly in the rippled waters, 
and the trunks of a few scattered pines along the 
farther beach draw black lines somewhat uncertain 
in the mirror. Just to be alive for such a moment 
is a joy beyond speech. It bears no relation to 
any gratified desire whatsoever. It is the strain- 
ing of the self beyond its limits, and we cease to 
want, to demand, to suffer; we know an abso- 
lutely impersonal joy, unruffled and unalloyed as 
the existence of tree, rock or mountain or freshly 
blossoming flower, and yet more full of content 
because more deeply alive, more keenly aware. 
The boy who stood in the copse each spring morn- 
ing at the break of dawn to hear a mocking-bird 
trill, as it fluttered up from its bush and down 
again, was laying aside a capacity for joy in living 
which no sorrow could quench, no deprivation 
deaden. The perception of beauty is a spiritual 
and a creative act, and who translates such per- 
ception into the medium of the spoken or the 
written word puts his shoulder against the world's 
burden and helps to shove it aside and widen the 
area of gladness. 

51 



THE HUMAN WAY 



The Poet, more than all others, has demanded 
entrance to the Temple of Beauty — has claimed 
the right to dwell there. Indeed, it is difficult 
sometimes to know whether we love scenery be- 
cause it reminds us of poetry, or poetry because 
it reminds us of scenery. It is certain that one 
of the chief charms of literature is its power of 
evoking memories of landscape. The poets, gath- 
ering up the dust of fleeting impressions, re-create 
the earth and cover it with a vivifying garment of 
thought, putting order and exactitude into our 
vague and chaotic impressions, and enhancing 
beauty by fitting it to noble sounds. They give 
us: 

**A sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns 
And the round ocean and the living air 
And the blue sky." 

No detail is too trivial for them to note and deck 
with beauty; the thick-leaved oak, the tender 
dove in firry woodlands, the ragged rims of thunder 
brooding low with shadow-streaks of rain, the long 
and pleasant grass, the tufted plover piping along 
the fallow lea, are a part of the zest in living. 

Their feeling for beauty carries with it not only 
spiritual promise and meaning, but purification, 

52 



HEALTH AND PURIFICATION 

as does any form of extension of the self. All 
reverence and admiration have in them the re- 
active blessedness of formal worship, and are, in 
themselves and in their power of exaltation and 
lifting above the level of sin and death, of the 
essence of true religion. In the wonderful death 
scene of Socrates, when his disciples turned to him 
and asked him what they could do to serve him, 
he replied: '* Take care of yourselves; by so doing 
ye shall best serve me and mine.*' Perhaps the 
truth is too easily lost sight of that by keeping 
our finer pleasures alive and alert we best serve 
the world. 

To see a countenance lit by innocent delight and 
lively health is a joy and benefit, and few things 
so conduce to these spiritual expressions as the 
simple habit of living close to the forces of which 
we are a product. There is a part of each year 
when we should all go out and camp. He knows 
this of a certainty who, year by year, has tried it 
and found it good. But experience makes per- 
fect; and after several trials a man knows that 
camping with a party is a futile and stupid ex- 
perience, and not unlike camping in evening 
clothes or near a town. If, for any frailty, phys- 
ical, mental or moral, one cannot camp alone — 
'' mutter seelen allein^'' as the Gennans emphati- 

S3 



THE HUMAN WAY 



cally and quaintly phrase it — ^then one should take 
a boy and a dog along; for they have a way of 
absenting themselves — tramping, exploring, swim- 
ming, fishing, or hunting — all day, and only turn 
up hungry and sleepy after sunset. Also, it is futile 
to camp if one is dependent upon three meals a 
day. Air and water are excellent nourishment, 
and a meal after tidying up camp in the middle 
of the morning and another after sunset with 
the dog and boy are all-sufficient to a hardy 
camper. Real camping requires at least five miles 
of surrounding silence and loneliness and a good 
spring of water, and then one's shelter matters 
little. A tent or a deserted log-cabin and a little 
help in the beginning at installing the woodpile 
and building a fireplace, suffice for all the needs 
of a man through August. To have a tent near 
that last forlorn refuge of the dull and the vacant, 
the summer hotel, is no camping at all, for the 
whole object of the expedition is to be thrown back 
once more upon one's own resources, and find out 
what civilisation and education and comforts 
have done for one. One has then a fair chance 
of measuring how much company one's thoughts 
and perceptions unaided can furnish. 

Perhaps the ideal camping lodge is an old de- 
serted cabin with a rustic bench on either side the 

54 



CAMPING 



door and a flowing stream with a good stone- 
lined pool not too far distant. To sit on one's 
front settle and look out upon miles of stretching 
meadow, hill and wood, gives one a lord-of-the- 
manor sensation which the most complex of man- 
sions with its serving-folk and difficult organisa- 
tion cannot bestow. Here is our leisure to enjoy 
and contemplate unbroken and unimpaired. 

"We plough the very skies, as well 

As earth; the spacious seas 
Are ours; the stars all gems excel. 

The air was made to please 
The souls of men; devouring fire 
Doth feed and quicken man's desire. 
The sun itself doth in its glory shine 

And gold and silver out of very mire, 
And pearls and rubies out of earth refine; 

While herbs and flowers aspire 
To touch and make our feet divine. 
How glorious is man's fate! 
The laws of God, the works He did create, 
His ancient ways, are His and my estate." 

One's bedroom should be all out-of-doors,- — be 
chosen not too far from the woodshed to pull one's 
cot or mattress in and out. For a bed is an 
ungainly piece of furniture in the daytime and 
should be hustled out of sight, and yet at night 
perfect contemplation requires springs and sheets. 

55 



THE HUMAN WAY 



Complete repose steals over him, however, who, 
lying in comfort a cot's height above the creeping 
ants and lizards, sees a wavering carpet about him 
of tall, gray grasses, thickly studded with daisies 
and harebells. The hillsides and overtopping 
mountains that form the distant circular walls 
blend in colour with the inwrought harebells, and 
shade from azure into misty purple, and all night 
the ceiling shifts. The clouds are wavering dra- 
peries fanned across the stars. Charles's Wain and 
Cassiopeia chassee around Polaris ; Vega, blue and 
steely, dominates at first the highest arch of the 
sky; and if over the eastern hills one notes a 
strange and splendid white glow, it means that in 
the course of an hour the broad face of the moon 
will peep over, laughing at the joke. He is a 
lucky camper who can keep awake, watching the 
scenery all night. Somehow, even with the best 
intents to see it all, the hours slip out of sight, the 
keen air blows us over into unconsciousness, and 
the glow of dawning awakens us. 

Straightway the path of the sun points out the 
swimming-pool, and then one begins to fetch water, 
to inspect the woodpile, to turn over one's stores. 
One whistles with the boy and scampers with the 
dog, and sweeps and orders and sets the day along 
to motion, 

56 



THE DAY LONG 



When the sun has ridden past the meridian, 
however, it is quite as natural to lie on one's back 
and inspect the depth of azure above and the sail- 
ing of those heaped-up, cotton-wool clouds that 
litter the blue floor of the sky with shreds and 
patches. The young camper may want to do 
things all day, but the beauty of many camping 
days is that one has learned to lie still on one's 
back all the long, lazy, declining afternoon, just 
staring at the shadows as they begin to slant, and 
the colours as they brighten along the horizon line. 
Nor must one ever regret the slow, still hours of a 
day when a uniform gray stretches from curve to 
curve of the horizon, and the rain falls steadily, 
unaggressively, unbrokenly through lagging time. 
One can heap the cushions on the settle, under the 
slanting roof of the doorway, and, with a raincoat 
thrown over one, keep still. The stiller one is, the 
more passive and patient one becomes, the better ; 
and only a stupid man would look about distrust- 
fully for useful thoughts. The thoughts that 
chance along the way, bowing themselves courte- 
ously through the consciousness, are much more 
like to be worth our hospitality than those we have 
chased and harried till they are worn out. And 
then, when one is very, very still, one begins to 
hear the steady swish of the rain as it falls through 

57 



THE HUMAN WAY 



the air and its gentle tapping on the sodden ground. 
In a stillness such as this all kinds of sounds be- 
come perceptible. Far off in the woods one hears 
the intermittent, subdued chatter of the birds. 
They do not sing, but occasionally they exchange 
a few remarks about the prospects of the weather. 
Now and then a bird's shrill cry breaks forth, in- 
tense and scolding — doubtless some mother -bird 
telling her restless young not to rtm out in the wet 
and get their feathers damp. Occasionally, too, 
the quiet, steady sounds are interrupted by some 
insect's shrilling. What about? Who knows? 
In such a lazy mood one can speculate for hours 
what the insect wanted, why it burst suddenly into 
audible eloquence and as suddenly stopped. Was 
the outburst effective? Was it indignation — a 
call upon the gods to right an evil world, or just 
a glorifying hymn of praise? And such long day, 
drawn to its close, need waken no reproachful 
thoughts of idleness. What better thing can we 
do for our Creator than stop to love and admire 
His handiwork? 

Perhaps the finest days are those when the air 
is heavy and inert, after the rain is over, and clouds 
are gray and hang hardly an arm's-length over the 
hilltops. Such a day presses all the colotir out of 
the earth; the brown and olive tones stand out 

58 



THE WORLD A-FOOT 



in the woods, and below the yellow grasses one 
sees an inch or two of vivid, sodden green, and the 
stems of the white birches stand out and flaunt 
themselves before the eyes like ladies at a garden- 
party. The stones are a wet, slippery gray, and 
one gets the odd sensation of light coming forth 
from the earth and rising toward the sky, the 
exactly contrary experience of watching, as even- 
ing falls, the darkness rising from the clefts in the 
furrows of the earth, slowly spreading and en- 
wrapping the woods and invading the sky. 

It is never worth while to waste our years with- 
out a few glad weeks of camping. For neither 
wealth, nor love, nor fame, nor achievement can 
repay us for the loss of those lazy hours when we 
might have lain prone beneath a beneficent heaven, 
staring at the clouds, peering through long grasses, 
watching the checkered sunlight break into the 
woods, or reviewing at night the marshalling of 
the heavenly forces. 

Rightly to know the by-paths as well as the 
dusty highroads, to count the wild flowers and 
listen to the birds' notes, to remember just what 
kinds of pine and birch grow, and where to expect 
the maple, oak, and elm, the choke-cherry and the 
rowan-tree, one must travel through the country 
afoot. To peep through the window at a gurgling 

59 



THE HUMAN WAY 



brook is one thing, but to follow it along until the 
feet ache and burn, and then to sit and dabble 
them in it until one starts up renewed and re- 
freshed for the home run, is another and a far 
more memorable experience. There is an tmfor- 
gettable intimacy established with such a brook 
and its song; its stones, its miniature falls, and 
soft, grassy places are a part of our mental life in 
seasons of dryness and under wintry skies. To 
travel afoot is to know the abundant joy of racing 
blood setting the body all a-tingle, and to get ac- 
quainted with the folk in the villages and along 
the highway. To know men, met at haphazard 
down the road, lifts the mind from narrow pro- 
vincialism of class and sectional distinctions. Per- 
haps we have been inclined to pity the poor and 
to be morbidly anxious to relieve them from a 
situation so devoid of accessories. To walk the 
road and ask the hospitality of the chance comer 
is a lesson in the equalisation of happiness. 

A hale old man of sixty, travelling with an 
equally hale old woman in a wagon containing their 
whole cooking apparatus and a tent for the night 
lodging, gladly shared a meal of corn-bread, butter- 
milk, and Irish potatoes roasted in the ashes of a 
little bonfire, while they expatiated on the de- 
lights of a nomadic life in terms fit for Juggling 

69 



JUGGLING JERRY 



Jerry. A blacksmith by trade, he said he was, but 
he handed over the business to apprentices while 
all the summer long he and his wife drove through 
the land, pitching their tent by night and sleeping 
on balsam boughs with the flaps of the tent thrown 
open to the stars. It took no longer than ten 
minutes to picket the horses and pitch the tent 
when they foimd a grassy spot and a spring tow^- 
ard evening. It was a cheap way of living, for it 
cost every bit of thirty dollars a month to run 
their establishment at home, whereas, living in 
the open, they reduced the sum to eighteen or 
twenty a month without any privations. More- 
over, he looked for horse-trades along the way and 
often turned a pretty penny, and he lent out his 
cow to his poorer neighbours while he was gone; 
and charity like that counted to one's credit side 
in the Beyond. Then the Beyond, once men- 
tioned, loomed bigger, and he continued: ''There 
is folks as don't believe in enjoyin' yer life while 
yer got it. But I do. Why, what did our Saviour 
say on earth? He said: *You eat, drink, and be 
merry; to-morrow you may die.''' He was an 
asttite citizen, that blacksmith, and he felt the 
seal of approval upon his whole career. 

But there are other than human intimacies to 
be cultivated by the wayfarer. Who that travels 

6i 



THE HUMAN WAY 



in train or conveyances knows the birds' nests, or 
sees young thrushes getting the first lessons in fly- 
ing, as does he who falls asleep by a mossy stone 
and slowly opens his eyes to hear the scolding of 
a mother thrush, and to see four small, downy 
babies, gaping perilously on a twig and listening 
to counsels of perfection for birds. It is the foot- 
traveller only who counts sixty different kinds of 
wild flowers in as many miles' stretch, and who 
hears the vesper sparrow sing at sunset. There 
is, too, all the glory of independence to be counted 
in. To feel one's own completeness one need only 
travel fifteen to twenty miles a day for a week and 
find out how difficult it is to get rid of five dollars 
in that time, to know the insistent camaraderie 
and good-fellowship of the road to those on foot. 
Whether it's the real glory of being mistaken for 
a veritable tramp or whether 

"The market girls and fishermen 
The soldiers and the sailors too," 

simply like to flaunt the light-hearted gayety of 
their lives in the faces of those habitually de- 
prived, it would be difficult to decide, but no- 
where else in the world is there such hospitality 
and kindness, such trustful cordiality and con- 

62 



NATURE^S LIMITATIONS 

fidence, as greets the footsore and weary when he 
unbuckles his pack and makes a halt in his tramp. 
There is, of course, a limit to this complete under- 
standing of nature, and our at-one-ment with all 
created earth may easily be snapped. It requires 
only one good day's march from home or from 
any shelter, a sudden darkening of the sky, and 
the fond Mother Nature, so infinitely and various- 
ly beautiful, is converted into a hostile force — alien, 
harsh, destructive. One realises then that if a 
man has carried civilisation too far and has swamp- 
ed himself in his belongings, he has at least done 
so in a natural self-defence. If one is inclined to 
feel rather contemptuous of the big athlete who 
confessed that it took just half a man's waking 
hours to keep his body in order, one is yet brought 
to feel that there is a happy medium between 
savagery and the Waldorf. To wander forth in 
the gray of dawn, to go on and on until eighteen 
miles from home — one's own or any one else's — to 
sit down at the end of a mountain gorge with sheer 
gray cliffs rising steep on either side and a wide, 
frothing stream gushing in between, with an im- 
perfectly blazed trail behind as the only guide to 
a distant shelter, and to watch a storm break, 
awakens the conviction that the world is not really 
so much one's own as one had dreamed in the sunlit 

63 



THE HUMAN WAY 



morning. The breeze which fanned us then freezes 
us now; the heavens blacken and glower malig- 
nantly; a deep, prolonged grumbling as of wild 
beasts after prey begins in the distance; sudden 
flashes of light throw out the cliffs and forests in 
lurid grotesque wise; and all these are far from 
native and home-like phenomena; man becomes 
conscious that creation exists for some more un- 
fathomable purpose than to add to his joy in living. 
How innocent and round and shiny the moon 
looks, peeping over the eastern tips of the moun- 
tains when the earth has laid ^side her evil mood. 
It is not so easy for a chance wayfarer, wrapped in 
borrowed blankets with wet and steaming clothes 
pressed close to his burning skin, to forget. He is 
apt to drive homeward a chastened and a saddened 
spirit. Yes, Nature can deceive. Wilful, femi- 
nine, and capricious, she smiles to trap him into a 
presumptuous fondness, the better to flout him. 
The wayfarer remembers a certain friend who, 
taken suddenly ill at a far-away mountain house, 
exclaimed, weakly: ''I don't mind dying, but I 
want to die where I can buy cologne and have the 
frills on my night -shirt fluted!'' The wayfarer 
who once felt only scorn for such yearnings is apt 
to be converted. His heart will ever after fail 
him when he threatens to elope with a blanket 

64 



SUPERFLUITIES 



and a book to a mountain-top and live alone till 
the winter snows drive him down. He realises 
that civilised man has given his heart and his 
peace to tubs of hot water, laundered clothes, 
scented soaps, bath - towels, cooked food, open 
fires, and softly-tinted walls. 

A lady, who was also a philanthropist, crossed 
the Russian frontiers to visit Tolstoi and, ushered 
into the presence of the great saint, she uttered 
the usual conventional greetings and exclama- 
tions, while the sage eyed her abstractedly and 
silently. "As if," she said— ''as if he were quietly 
turning back the top of my head and looking at 
the thoughts inside.'' When she ceased speaking, 
he touched her large and, at the time, fashionable 
sleeve, and said, sweetly: ''Why do you wrap so 
much cloth on your arms? If you ripped it off 
it would make a nice frock for a little girl.'' The 
great difficulty, then, is to draw the line at suffi- 
ciency. Man thrown loose upon the caprices of 
nature is not man at his best; man spending 
half his waking hours upon the care of his body, 
is not man at his best. Wherever protection and 
necessary care are converted into luxury and super- 
fluity, he is weakened. But doubtless time will 
renew the bond between man and Nature, drawing 
him ever closer to her, teaching him to extract 

5 65 



THE HUMAN WAY 



health and peace and patience from her and to 
thwart her caprices by his ingenuity. To live con- 
fined by artificial limits the year round, is to let 
civilisation wreak great vengeance upon us, dull- 
ing our senses, weakening our bodies. There is a 
constant need to renew the bond to nature, to 
come again into our natural heritage of the earth, 
so that the whole girth of the world may be our 
playground and the material of our joy. 

As for the real sensation of deserving the chaplet 
of the sage, the average mortal is most like to win 
it when he spends long, idle, rambling days in the 
spring woods; for, just at this time of the year, 
they are wrought with miracles of delicacy and 
intricacy and beauty beyond speech. 

Every place in the world has its own time for per- 
fection. One can never echo quite whole-heartedly 
Browning's — 

"Oh, to be in England 
Now that April's there!" 

Not that England has not perennial charm; but 
why not be there in Jtme, while one 's about it, 
when, the cold and the drizzling grayness are once 
and for all folded up and laid on the shelf, and 
when the larks wheel, circling, singing over every 
field, dropping their ''silver chain of sound'*; when 
all the wild flowers of Milton's Lycidas and 

66 



THE SPRING WOODS 



Arnold's Thyrsis and Shelley's Question are trail- 
ing and blooming and bedecking the whole face 
of the earth, and when every wind that blows is 
faint with the fumes of sunlight and of earth? 
Every one who is attentive to the real business of 
life, the catching at all the stray ends of beauty 
and heaping them in a treasure-trove of memory, 
knows that the proper time to see Normandy, 
Brittany, and the New England hills is September, 
when a little forecasting tinge of frost is in the air, 
glinting white over the meadows in the early 
morning, just by way of adding glitter to the 
flashing pageant of the auttimn leaves. But if 
one owned the magic carpet, as truly all human 
beings should, one would sit down upon it just 
about the tenth of April every year, and give the 
order, "To the Southern woods/' Probably it 
would be better to leave the carpet by the road- 
side, near some old historic town, and walk — for 
it would be a pity to miss the mile-long hedges of 
golden broom flinging their wild arms over the 
straggling white road that runs 

** Like a lane out of heaven that leads through a dream,** 

a sight equal in its glory to Wordsworth's ''host 
of golden daffodils." How the words bring the 

67 



THE HUMAN WAY 



picture to the mind! He must have made a sud- 
den turning and come upon them quite by sur- 
prise — a whole field of molten gold, ten thousand 
daffodils waving in the wind. What wonder that 
Shelley, falling upon a like experience, should 
have swooned away with sheer delight of the 
vision, since he was so slightly bound down to 
earth that emotion invariably loosened the frail 
tie. Whoever has driven up a certain bare rise 
of land and overlooked a tiny, worn-old, but once 
historic-proud village in Virginia has seen a sight 
not less overwhelming in its glory — miles upon 
miles of the golden broom hedges. 

And then one penetrates from the roadside into 
the softened and checkered light of the woods. The 
trees at this time of the year combine the beauties 
of both winter and summer; they are still par- 
tially bare to the blue sky, letting through wonder- 
ful lace-like traceries, and yet the tender green be- 
speaks the fuller shade that shall come when the 
sun has worked himself up to his full midsummer 
fervour. The long-needled pines hung with brown 
cones overtop the other trees, their great straight, 
aspiring stems drawing lines in the wilderness, and 
below them the low-growing, wide-spreading dog- 
wood raises its layers of pure white blossoms, like an 
unexpected shower of baby moons caught on the 

68 



NOONTIDE AND SUNSET 

branches and held ; and in between, for sheer lux- 
uriance and supererogation, the red-bud and the 
Judas-tree add their flash of colours. Lower still 
there are wild knotted tangles of coral honeysuckle 
and yellow jasmine clinging to the holly- trees, and 
still lower the wild azalea blooms, pink and white 
in her glossy leaves. Just peeping above the dead 
leaves rise the pink lady's-slipper, green jacks-in- 
the-pulpit, serious, straight, and comical withal, 
and everywhere sweet-scented bracken. As one 
nears the edge of the wood, what more natural 
than a wide stretch of the red columbines, hang- 
ing jewel -like above their large and tender tre- 
foils? 

The noon hour should be spent deep in the 
woods and among the tree -tops. One need not 
climb, but, lying flat on one's back, one sees all 
the affairs half-way between earth and heaven. 
A bald-headed mother eagle may be scolding her 
three awkward young ones in the nest and spurring 
them on to make an effort to fly. There is much 
encouragement to be derived from seeing an 
eaglet wavering on the branch, flapping his wings 
and afraid to trust himself in the air, and then, 
finally, soaring off so easily and comfortably. And 
there, in the noonday stillness, with the sun throw- 
ing fantastic shapes of light upon the ground, out 

69 



THE HUMAN WAY 



of the quiet and the silence the little furtive wood- 
noises penetrate — the tapping of the woodpecker, 
the squirrel's chirp, the whiz of wing as the hum- 
ming-birds fly past, and the drone and buzz of 
insects. No birds sing just at this hour; but blue 
and scarlet and cardinal colour, olive and gray and 
brown, the little specks of melodious life flit past 
us, bent, doubtless, too, upon the hoarding of 
beauty after their kind. 

The hours move slower in the afternoon. Be- 
fore the great catastrophe of sunset there is a 
pause, a retard of the action of the daily pageant. 
The slant rays of the sun linger lazily among the 
briers and the bushes; a golden and russet haze 
glows over all the woodland greenery. The day is 
growing grave and reverend, slow of movement and 
majestic. The colour in the woods fades, and a 
purplish-brown mist, called darkness, begins to 
rise from the breast of the earth. Then to the 
edge of the wood for a sight of the open sky, where 
the lord of the world is sinking, drawing after him 
the great wing-shaped, roseate-hued clouds! Pale 
lines of primrose yellow, slashes of green and lilac 
and purple, lie back of the flaming clouds: 

" Look now where Colour, the soul's bridegroom, makes 
The house of heaven splendid for the bride." 

70 



AUTUMNAL THOUGHTS 



With the flowering of heaven colour dies out ; the 
earth takes on a pale and ashen hue; nun-robed 
the evening comes as the day dies and the woods 
fade. 

A very different feeling comes over us viewing 
the self -same woods in autumn ; as the mind broods 
on the aspects of the scenes, the sympathetic 
analogies between the natural processes and hu- 
man life force themselves upon our attention. It 
was Villon who wrote it long ago : 

"Where are the snows of yester-year?" 

And long before Villon, and since ever history be- 
gan, men have stood marvelling, as we stand, at 
this vision of time trickling away like the wind not 
caught in a net — all life, all existence, all seem- 
ingly solid forms as fluid as the moments, the hours, 
the seasons. Nothing remains ; no mood is stable ; 
change alone is changeless. 

"What is the world's delight? 
Lightning that ttiocks the night, 
Brief even as bright.*' 

Pleasure and pain, hopes and fears, seize us in 
turn ; and just as we grow to know them, perhaps 
to cling to them, yearning to call some one thing 
ours, they pass by and become, too, a figment and 

71 



THE HUMAN WAY 



a dream. So in the autumn weather more than 
other times we face the flux of things, when on all 
sides the green below and blue above are trans- 
formed to an earth all gold and russet, set in a 
skyey framework of chill, wan gray. The eyes of 
time are turned backward, 

"And spectral seem the winter-boding trees, 
The ruinous bowers and drifted foliage wet,'* 

the baring branches make intricate traceries 
against the wan sky, and the dying warmth of 
summer and faint heralding of frost mingle to- 
gether in the air. This is the year's twilight, the 
moment when rest and reflection set in, the hour 
when we invite those coherent, waking dreams 
that shadow forth but faintly the fantastic, ill- 
assembled images of night. It is the season which 
tallies with a man's years from fifty to sixty, with 
a woman's from forty to fifty — ^the moment when 
at last the thick of the fight with alien forces is 
past, when the basis of the structure of life is 
builded for better or worse, and we yield ourselves 
up to a systematic setting of our house of thought 
in order, to a revision of our set of values ; we fling 
aside all superfluities and face the slow stripping 
of life in view of the long journey just ahead of us 
into the dim unknown. And this little foothold 

72 



THE TWILIT YEARS 



at the parting of the ways, this moment of fullest 
maturity and impinging decay, is in life, as in the 
year, the point of most enchanting beauty, of most 
poignant charm — ^the season when reflection and 
peace usurp the effort and hustle of mid-life, when 
the personal horizon is slowly lifting, and we get 
wider and longer vistas into the unknown, the sea- 
son when the bitterness of loss is somewhat stilled, 

"In the hushed mind's mysterious far-away 
Doubtful what ghostly thing will steal the last 
Into that distance, gray upon the gray." 

Spring is the season of fresh endeavour and 
young impulse; summer is the time for the ripen- 
ing, enlarging, maturing of all projects; and then, 
lest man should for an instant fancy himself stable 
upon the earth, should picture this earthly life as 
ultimate, Autumn, the ** metaphor of everything 
that dies,'' comes in, counting the falling petals on 
her rosary, setting the clouds of birds into flight, 
letting her earth wither or ever she shrouds her, 
putting the seal of the passing of all mortal things 
upon the face of life. Then we realise that we, too, 
are ebbing out with the dying year. If man forces 
action in youth, it is in the high-hearted hope of 
seeing the results; but in our autumn years we 
force action, knowing that the little we do must be 

73 



THE HUMAN WAY 



swiftly done; otir years are few, our hopes are 
brittle; we have learned to expect little or no re- 
turn; we have come to the age when we are — 

"Not panting after growing beauties; so 
We shall ebb out with those who homeward go." 

If we have lived naturally, taking the joys and 
fighting the sorrows of the years as they rolled, 
there is a genial temper in the autumn weather. 
Silence and peace and dreams draw over us un- 
awares, and we start up to wonder where all the 
tumults of yesterday are flown. Grief and suffer- 
ing leave little in the memory, but joy stays there. 
**Joy is the name of a passion in which the mind 
passes to a greater perfection and power,'' said one, 
anticipating Spinoza, and grief we see often as the 
material of joy in process of slow transformation. 
There is another crown on the autumnal years: 
the detachment of which we have thought, for 
which we have striven all through the spring and 
summer of our lives, is with us, we know not how 
nor whence. We are ready, without urging, to fold 
our hands a little and look on. We are glad to lay 
aside the vestment of the personal life, with all its 
desires and hopes and ambitions, and to drift, even 
as Nature herself is drifting, into the ultimate cold 
and quiet which precede new birth. 

74 



SOUNDS 



If we brood on the natiiral aspects of life, so 
also do we note the natural forces, being, indeed, 
the products of them and bound up with them in 
the general law of existence. Our superior or- 
ganisation can at least be shown in wilfully turn- 
ing them into sources of pleasure and making them 
serve and delight us. There would seem to be no 
sort of doubt in the mind of any attentive ob- 
server of life that sotmds can conquer passion, in- 
spire courage, create hope, and work various other 
wonders in the mind and heart. To go to sleep to 
the drip of rain-drops on a tin roof is as soothing, 
as tenderly quieting an experience as to come un- 
expectedly from the glare and bustle of the day 
into a twilit room, where a harp is softly giving out 
arpeggios or where a sweet-toned piano is singing 
that little prelude in D-flat major of Chopin, the 
reiterated dropping upon A-flat and the occasional 
step up to B-flat and back exactly imitating the 
insistent song of the rain when it falls upon metal. 
Let a man who has a tendency to nurse wrath or 
brood over grief listen on every possible occasion 
to such a rain-song, and he will find his grief be- 
coming involuntarily acquiescent, and his anger 
will seem out of keeping. The steady, low melody, 
broken only here and there by a louder splash, is 
so full of the inevitable necessity of things as they 

75 



THE HUMAN WAY 



are, and the personal passions wane so before in- 
exorable insistence. 

Quite different and of varying import is the 
sound of the rain-drops heard as thej^ fall upon 
sodden earth and decaying leaves in the February 
woods. The song breathes mystery and merri- 
ment. To take shelter under a heavy-branching 
tree and hold one's breath while one listens to the 
rain pattering down, to its soft thudding accom- 
paniment and its occasional rippling arias, is to 
be made very credulous, very open-minded tow- 
ard all hidden wonders and underlying miracles of 
earth. No one, under such conditions, would be 
surprised to open his eyes and see a small yellow- 
and- brown wood -fairy with a peaked cap and 
beady eyes perched upon the toadstool at his feet, 
all ready for a general Socratic dialogue. 

The sound of rain, with that of wind, bears the 
more intimate messages to man, but birds' songs 
are direct appeals and never to be missed. Even 
the earth's sounds have liberating powers; they 
let us go free of our prisons and send us out into 
the larger life, the wider world where are scope and 
joy and pain and vastness and endless wonder. 
Who are you, they say to us, to be bound up in 
yourself? Are you not of us — a part of the si- 
lence and the spheric symphony, a part of the ebb 

76 



THE WIND'S VOICE 



and the flow of being ? Are not you, too, life and 
death and love and wonder and being and growth ? 
Cast, then, the fetters ; be free ; and live and speak 
as we live and speak in the endless spaciousness 
of eternity. 

Of all sounds none is more constantly with us 
than the wind's voice. It is an enemy when as 
little children we listen, cowering under the bed- 
clothes, to its ghastly night orgies. Then all the 
awful things we have heard of, that people this 
unfamiliar world where we are not yet at home or 
at ease, seem to be up and busy. The shutters 
begin to creak, the air is full of strange swishings 
and whisperings, weird fingers are tapping at the 
window-panes, and, pitched a note or two above 
the whistle of the wind, an unearthly voice wails 
and laments an unearthly horror. 

But as we grow older and braver there comes 
an element of adventuring and romance in the 
wind's voice. We hear its horses galloping past 
us in the darkness, making for strange lands where 
only doughty heroes penetrate, and what is there 
to prevent our mounting them and galloping away 
from all the cark and clutch of circumstance? 
So, fancy rides out on the cry of the winds into 
lonely mountain fastnesses, to the fair land that lies 
the farther side of the moon, across snow-swept 

77 



THE HUMAN WAY 



plains where far, far below we see a long, thin line 
of black wolves running, and the yelp they send 
up to the skies reaches us as an overtone to the 
wind's shrill song as we swing through space a 
hundred miles an hour. 

Then there comes a time when, if we are good 
children and well brought up, we become acquaint- 
ed with a little boy named Diamond, who is the 
intimate of the North Wind, and who, because he 
knew not fear, went on a whole bookful of glad 
adventures with her, always trusting her under 
her varying aspects of grave and gay, cold and 
gentle, although he saw her at times when her 
whole face turned black with blowing, or when she 
spread out great dark bat's wings that covered 
the whole sky; he heard her rage worse than the 
blacksmith's wife, and saw her turn at will into a 
serpent or a tiger by way of variety ; occasionally, 
on her nightly voyages, she would leave Diamond 
on the top ledge of a great gray cathedral and let 
him peer down into it as it .yawned below him, a 
silent gulf hollowed out of stone. An acquaint- 
ance that grows up from such a basis as this does 
away with fear, and as we grow older we learn to 
listen eagerly for the wind, typifying as it does to 
us all the scope and freedom that fills the spaces 
between the earth and the stars. 

78 



THE WIND'S NIGHT-SONG 

When the burdens and cares of this world press 
too heavily on frail mortality, doubtless sleepless- 
ness is an evil thing, and a man may well have 
recourse to the sage medicine -man to get rid of 
himself and the teasing, insistent sense of his fleshly 
and social state. But let a man be, as by every 
moral right he should be, of a clear conscience, 
sane nerves, and becalmed ambitions, and, above 
all, let him be free of all debts, and he cannot 
but lament the loss of so much good life in sleep- 
ing. How much joy there is in lying healthily and 
attentively alert through the night's still vigils! 
Then, chiefly, do we hear the strange discourses of 
the wind. We know nothing of whence it comes 
or whither it goes, but it flaps past us, singing un- 
earthly melodies, clean, uncurbed, vivifying and 
elemental, the infinite breath whirling from eternal 
spaces to eternal spaces. But the wind is not only 
a night friend. It is a fine companion for the 
striding heart; for him who, in early autumn or 
before the birth of spring, wanders a-field just for 
the joy of seeing the clouds set a-dancing or hurtled 
in rough haste across the sky from east to west, 
for none knows what dire or gracious purposes. 
And have you ever, late in March or early in 
April, wandered out on a slash of land carpeted 
with brown pine-needles, and sat down on the 

79 



THE HUMAN WAY 



soggy ground to see the sap, like purple mist, rising 
in the bare twigs, and heard the wind play a duet 
on the reeds that line the edge of the slash and 
the pine tops above them ? Low in the reeds and 
high in the pines, Pan pipes — the careless, mirth- 
ful, goat-footed Pan — glad that his kingdom is 
waking to life again; and his song is only a little 
wistful, a few shifting minor intervals replacing the 
screechings and wailings of his winter nights. Nor 
is the song wholly silenced even in the most wind- 
less of moonlit summer evenings; if, in the hush, 
we strain our ears, we hear a long, deep, alternate- 
ly indrawn and outgoing breath ; is it Pan in silent 
ecstasy, or just the slow, sleepy breathing of the 
planet as it swings? Who has not felt his indo- 
lent dreams rise on such gentle summer breezes to 
go a- wandering among the vales of vanity ? 

Dickens has a charming essay on the jovial win- 
ter wind, in the chapter wherein Martin Chuzzle- 
wit and Tom Pinch leave Mr. Pecksniff's house. 
What an agreeable and praiseworthy habit it was 
of those early Victorians (would that their like 
should be born again !) to sow little essays all over 
their novels, and what a creditable thing it would 
be if the living novelist would go and do likewise! 
But perhaps the mind of man is so narrowed by 
specialisation that it no longer holds innumerable 

80 



THE MESSENGER 



little essays as well as its definitely conceived plots. 

There are as many winds as there are moods of 

man, but it is the jovial, boisterous winter wind 

that Dickens painted — a wind sweeping across breezy 

downs, '' tracking its flight in darkening ripples on the 

grass and smoothest shadows on the hills. ' ' It nipped 

the face and blinded the wayfarer, and stopped his 

breath as though he had been soused in cold water. 

That was another wind which blew strong and 

steady and cold through Rossetti's lines that depict 

more exquisitely than any others the numbness of 

perfect grief: 

''The wind flapped loose, the wind was still, 
Shaken out dead on tree and hill; 
I had walked on at the wind's will, — 
I sat now, for the wind was still." 

What a universal experience that is! Who is 
there who hasn't taken up the burden of sorrow 
too great to bear within closed doors and walked 
with it where the wind's wailing and screeching 
was a himian utterance — where headlong floods 
and potmding waves beat upon earth too, an im- 
potent agony ? There is one bit of prose in which 
the wind is captured and set to words almost 
as perfectly as in Rossetti's stanza. In the last 
chapters of Prince Otto, where the romance rests 
in abeyance while the night falls and the dawn 
6 8i 



THE HUMAN WAY 



wakes over the tattered, fleeing princess, ''the 
sound of the wind in the forest swelled and sank 
and drew near with a running rush and died away 
in the distance into faint whispers/' 

It is the very voice of life, this wind, this mes- 
senger of eternity singing from out the void into 
the void, beating the seas into life as it passes, 
cleaving the oceans into chasms, bearing the petrel, 
the sea-mew, the gull on its wings, sweeping clean 
the floors of the forests, burnishing brighter the 
very stars set in the arcades of night. As the 
human breath utters the voice in the throat, so 
the wind plays through all the innumerable throats 
of nature, waking each whistle, whir, wail, and 
song to a great choral chant. 

There is one other office we think of the wind 
as fulfilling. Who is not at moments mindful of 
the last hour, when the body shall have played its 
game to the finish and stretched itself stark and 
dumb for the long rest ? And who can help hoping 
that as the soul unfurls its wings for the new and 
strange adventure, it shall be upborne, like the 
gull and the petrel, on the great wind's wings, 
coming even as its child, the soul, no man knows 
whence, going no man knows whither, yet surely, 
surely passing, from time to time, in the great, void 
spaces of night, some little lighted islands of life. 

82 



Ill 

THE CHILDREN 

MAN fixes his heart upon the mutable. It is, 
L doubtless, the very evanescence of all beauty 
which puts the keen edge of poignancy to our affec- 
tions. If we could look upon anything as likely 
to remain forever the same, we should, in all prob- 
ability, postpone loving it until some more con- 
venient season. But we look upon all things with 
the yearning foreknowledge of change and loss. 
Toute passe. And so dull are we in our heavy 
garments of clay, so unequal to the task of alert- 
ness and pursuit, that it is this very passing which 

consecrates. 

* 

And so it is with childhood. We look upon it 
and know it to be changing its aspect from day to 
day, nay, hour by hour fleeting past us to be lost 
so swiftly, so irretrievably! This it is, probably, 
that makes the love of childhood so spontaneous 
and unforced. In our gaiety a child is the most 
natural companion and in our grief the most heal- 

83 



THE HUMAN WAY 



ing presence. And what an ever-living interest 
and solace is in the whole environment and cir- 
cumstance of a home where children are grow- 
ing up ! 

The other day, rummaging in the attic, back of 
some old shutters and decrepit, much be-labelled 
trunks, I found what at first sight appeared to be 
a gray, crumpled sheet, but when it had been 
thrown out on the kitchen roof and shaken free 
of dust and spread forth in the sunlight it proved 
to be a long and wide expanse of faded blue cam- 
bric, pasted over with a silver crescent moon and 
bunches of white tulle clouds and gilt cardboard 
stars — one of them very much larger and finer than 
the rest. Then, with the sudden vague pang that 
comes when one remembers, under strange skies, 
the things that have been and are dead, it came over 
me that this was the cambric sky that used, years 
ago, to be tacked over the nursery walls, as a 
canopy to the Christmas-tree, in the nursery where 
the grave baby, the smiling baby, and the little 
silent baby played with their Ruler. It is many 
years now since, on Christmas Eve, the three 
babies were deprived of three white cribs that 
stood in a row in the nursery, and were stowed 
away in strange, grown-up beds, while the Ruler, 
full of the keenest, gayest delight, hung three 

84 



THE CAMBRIC SKY 



stockings on the hooks around the fireplace — a 
long, slim, black little stocking, a short white sock, 
and a tiny woollen sock with blue trimmings — 
tacked the blue cambric sky with its Star of Beth- 
lehem over the ceiling, and let it hang down be- 
tween the two eastern windows, and built up the 
tree in a tub in front of it. On the topmost twig 
there was always a paper-doll angel standing on 
one toe, with gilt paper wings and gauzy robes, 
and each twig had a coloured candle, pink and 
blue and white and pale yellow, to match the 
flames; and gilded nuts were fastened to the 
boughs with wires, and gay cornucopias filled with 
candies dangled and bobbed and weighed heavy, 
and there were strings of popcorn draped through 
the green branches; and off in the corner, hidden 
by the wash-hand-stand, were three large pails of 
water and two old blankets, placed there prudent- 
ly, not by the inapprehensive Ruler at all, but by 
the Ruler's Ruler, who used to arrange them with 
his own tmaccustomed hands while he muttered: 
''Perfectly irrational! No reason why my home 
and my property should be imperilled once a year 
by four children's foolish play/' And yet there 
were only three stockings, as the Ruler would 
silently attest. 

So I sat down out in the October sunshine on the 

85 



THE HUMAN WAY 



kitchen roof and looked at the worn and ancient 
sky, and wondered and wondered whither the past 
slips away. For, under the roof, there is no nurs- 
ery any more, and the young person who warily 
and almost imperceptibly has usurped the place 
of the grave baby is a pretty girl who likes jewelry 
for her Christmas gift — "only one piece, please, 
but really good"; and where the smiling baby sat 
there is still a smiling youth who spends Christmas 
afternoon cleaning guns and oiling leather, in view 
of setting out early on the twenty-sixth for a 
hunting expedition; and the silent baby's place is 
empty. Only the Ruler's Ruler is unchanged, 
and if there were to be a Christmas-tree ever again 
he would doubtless arrange a hose and other ex- 
tinguishers and say, under his breath, "It's all 
nonsense." 

But the beginning of Christmas in the nursery 
was not on Christmas Eve. It began weeks be- 
forehand, when the Ruler, who always spent the 
twilight playing in the nursery, would come home 
very tired from down -town and tell the round- 
eyed, staring babies that Santa Claus was waiting 
to speak to her in the up-stairs back room, where 
babies never penetrated, because there was a long, 
dimly lighted passage leading thereto, in which the 
grave baby had placed a "naboyant'' (pronounced 

86 



BEFORE CHRISTMAS 



like a French word) which she had invented to 
terrify herself pleasantly and the younger babies 
less agreeably. When she was pressed to define 
her ''naboyant" more closely, she explained that 
it was a round ball of fire, floating and whizzing 
about in the air, and it tried to get into the mid- 
dle of the palm, of your hand, and when it did 
"you'd be deaded as quick as quick, and go into the 
Valley of the Shadow.'' It was useless to try to 
demolish this fiction of the grave baby's, for though 
she exceeded the smiling baby in years and ex- 
perience but twenty months, and the silent baby 
but three and a half years, her authority was 
unparalleled. Indeed, when religious instruction 
was first tried upon the smiling baby, and the 
Ruler began, after the ancient and approved meth- 
od, with, ''Who made you?" the smiling baby re- 
sponded with unhesitating and firm conviction, 
''Sister made me." "Oh no," said the instructor, 
" sister did not make you. God made you, and He 
made the sun and the moon and the stars, and 
mamma and papa and everybody." But still the 
smiling baby's eyes were fixed on the older baby 
as he inquired, stupidly, "Sister, did you make 
God?" 

When the Ruler emerged from the back room 
she would be met by three small white figures with 

87 



THE HUMAN WAY 



rumpled curls and excited eyes and the question, 
''What did he say?'' And Santa Clauses interest 
was invariably — how good were they ? The grave 
baby, who was an imaginative and emotional soul, 
born with a conviction of sin, would never give 
definite answers; the smiling baby from that day 
to this has always been untrammelled by dotibts 
of his own merit; and the little silent baby was 
never even asked, because he was still wrapped in 
"trailing clouds of glory/' 

One does not know how it happened, but the 
Christ-child was always a more approachable, a 
more gracious and even a more intimate personality 
among the babies than Santa Claus, though the 
smiling baby had once hazarded that he betted 
''the blessed Christ-child and Santa Claus sleeped 
together up in heaven." It was probably because 
the Christ -child was never supposed to ask after 
merits and demerits that the babies just loved 
Him and were never afraid. It was to Him the 
smiling baby prayed one night, confident of a full 
sympathy and understanding: "Please, wilt Thou 
send down into my house another little boy, just 
as big as me, to fight with,'' And again, one night, 
being a person of a speculative turn of mind, he 
sat bolt upright in his crib and asked, " Is blessed 
Christ -child in this room? Right here in this crib 

88 



CHRISTMAS EVE 



by me?" Then, smiling afiEectionately and rolling 
himself well over to one side against the bars, he 
said, ''I'm goin' to give He plenty of room/' 

Christmas Eve was an exciting night to every 
one concerned with the nursery. The babies and 
their big black mammy had been banished from 
their stronghold all day long, and at six o'clock they 
were put into strange beds ; and the rest of the day 
and late into the evening the Ruler worked in the 
nursery. Even the twilight hour was cut short, 
and it was only when prayers were said that she 
sat with the white-robed cherubs and led them 
as they sang: 

"Dear Father, whom I cannot see, 
Look down from heaven on little me; 
Let angels through the darkness spread 
Their shining wings about my bed." 

In the evening the black mammy, too, worked 
and exclaimed and carried in parcels from the back 
room and unwrapped, and even the Ruler's Ruler 
sometimes carried in the heaviest things — the hob- 
by-horse and the doll-carriage. And at last all 
would be ready for the match that should set it 
ablaze in the morning and make it into a strange 
fairyland of wonders and delights. 

When the morning was still black and the stars 
all shining bright .and the babies sleeping sound, 

89 



THE HUMAN WAY 



the Ruler drove across the dark city streets to a 
great cathedral. All along the way one would 
pass carriages rattling over the cobblestones, and 
dark, bowed figures hastening through the coldest 
hours of the winter night ; and when the doors flew 
open, there was another altar ablaze with lights, and 
flowers were blooming everywhere, and over the heads 
of the kneeling throngs, floated the time - hallowed 
words: '' Adeste fideles'' and ''Venite adoremus,'' 

They were different, little home-made words, 
made just for one house and the one little trio of 
babies, that were sung when the nursery fire was 
blazing at six o'clock, and the tree was all lit up 
and the babies in white wool wrappers and slippers 
were led into the nursery, the silent baby sitting 
upright on the Ruler's arm with wide, amazed 
eyes, and the babies, grave and smiling, holding 
each other's hands, a little bit shy and dazzled by 
the unwonted ways; and there they stood in line 
singing their own Christmas song: 

"A star shone in the East one night 

At Christmas-time, at Christmas-time, 
And gave the watching shepherds light 

At blessed Christmas-time. 
A little Babe was born that night 
To give the whole dark earth its light 
And make the shadows take their flight 
At blessed Christmas-time." 
90 



PAST IS PAST 



It was a long carol of five verses, and the babies' 
eyes wandered and danced and their voices faltered, 
and usually at the end the Ruler would find her- 
self singing all alone, while the three babies had 
plunged forward into the midst of their Christmas 
joys, and the Ruler's Ruler began to extinguish 
the lights and talk about his house being afire, 
and the day broke and a new joy was heralded 
upon earth. 

Yes; all this was once. The Ruler, sitting in 
the sunlight, could see it pass like floating pictures 
before her eyes, and there remained nothing of it 
but the dusty gray sky, which must be burned. 
The Ruler wondered how much the smiling youth 
remembered and how much the flower-like, reticent 
girl. She wondered what knowledge of it had 
floated away with the silent baby. Truly man 
groweth up as a flower, and life fleets past him, 
but intangible, ungraspable, and mirage-like though 
it be, life's beauty lives on, ever renewing itself 
and beginning again in fresh places. 

Unless one return to Wordsworth's ** trailing 
clouds of glory" it would be difficult to say just 
why these inexperienced creatures are the most 
delightful talkers in all the world. But it is true 
that we never hang with the same wide-eyed and 
breathless expectancy upon the lips of the great 

91 



THE HUMAN WAY 



sage or fluent orator as we do upon the oracular 
utterances of a child just viewing the world. Per- 
haps it is a faint adumbration of that rarest of 
God-given faculties, originality, pure and unob- 
structed, that holds us. At any rate, we are sel- 
dom disappointed of a little thrill of surprise when 
we turn to childhood for comment on life. The 
perception of the child is created from the inner 
thought and untainted by traditions and pre- 
suppositions. ''Let me see," said the smiling 
baby, still under two, upon being shown the moon 
for the first time — ''let me see; 111 look around 
and find me some more moons,'' and he scanned 
the sky hopefully. But the same experiment 
brought forth a widely varying result from the 
more literary baby, who, on being shown the moon 
for the first time, commented, dejectedly, "Not any 
cow.'* 

Even the dangers of literature and dogma are 
lessened for the very young by their free powers 
of rearrangement and application. The grave 
baby, just four years old, who had been taken to 
church for the first time, reproduced the whole 
scene with much ingenuity, taking for her text, as 
she stood in her high-chair, "Lead me in the paths 
of righteousness in the presence of mine enemies''; 
and then descending and donning her father's old 

92 



THE CHILD TALKING 



college cap, she sang with vim and endless reitera- 
tion, ''Let your light so shine, little brother, let 
your light so shine, that God will not put you in 
a bushel." 

Religious instruction as sifted through the child- 
ish intelligence results oddly, but it is full of the 
delights of the unexpected. The grave baby, being 
of strong theological predilections, was heard in- 
structing her inferior thus: ''Now 111 tell you 
exactly how I am made. First, there is little 
round me that is busy and does things; over that 
I wear a skeleton of bones and then all the sinful 
lusts of the flesh.'' Upon the superficiality of sin 
she might have been interpreted as having definite 
convictions, but when it came to the nature of 
Deity, patriotism obstructed her vision, for she 
wavered and finally confessed, " I don't know much 
about God anyway ; only one thing for sure, He is 
a Virginian." 

No field is shut to them, and we need not fancy 
them altogether cut off from the realms of philos- 
ophy. The smiling baby, gazing with real joy at 
a full moon, said, confidently, " It is very beautiful, 
and I made it myself." He was taken aside and 
reprimanded for laxity in integrity, but prolonged 
argument only resulted in the sobbing protestation, 
"Perhaps I did not make the realness of it, but I 

93 



THE HUMAN WAY 



know I made its shape and its shining/' Such 
was the appearance of good faith that the discom- 
fited representative of stern morality retired with 
a confused sense of dealing with a full-fledged 
Fichtean philosopher of five. 

At that early age not only life but art is full of 
suggestion, and much theory of life is built up 
upon pictorial representations. The small chubby 
baby, upon being reprimanded for escaping while 
he was being undressed and running about his 
room in a state of nature, turned at once to a 
Raphael Madonna over the fireplace, and point- 
ing to the infant Jesus, said, tritmiphantly, '*He 
used to done it." 

''When they bury the body,'' asked the smiling 
baby of his sister, *' how do they start the soul up 
to God?" 

'*Why, don't you know?" she said, surprised. 
''They chop the head off and tie little wings to the 
back of the neck, and it wings straight up." 

It is worthy of note that in earliest life the in- 
timacy with great mysteries is closest and surest. 
The grave baby at three years old being asked by 
the little brother, "What was the names of those 
angels that brang me down from heaven?" re- 
sponded, without an instant's hesitation, "One 
was Star-Bright and the other was Pleine-de- 

94 



THE REACTION UPON LITERATURE AND DOGMA 

grace." When she was cross-examined as to how 
she knew, she looked inscrutable and only said, 
**I always knowed/' But several years later, 
being told of a friend's sudden death, she stood a 
moment quiet and wondering, and then swiftly 
propounded these questions: 

*'Did her body get to heaven? 

**Will her soul take up her skeleton? 

" Does a soul have any kind of feet ? 

"When she gets there will God put an angel 
head upon her? 

**Will she wear a shirt-waist and skirt? 

**Will Jesus walk down to the gate and hand 
her out a judgment? 

"When will she get her judgment? 

"Will she climb up the steps to heaven or will 
angels carry her? My hymn says steps up to 
heaven. 

"Will she see Jesus at last in the real? 

"And will she see God, too, in the real? 

"I don't want to die, because of the valley of 
the shadow of death; that must be very dark." 

Then, without a pause, came, as a conclusion, 
a quick laying aside of the whole sad matter, as 
she sang out, cheerily, " I am going to hop to my 
bath on one foot." And she did, chanting as she 
went, "P-e-a-d — dead, dead, dead." 

9S 



THE HUMAN WAY 



To the gentleness and delicacy of childish meth- 
ods too high a praise cannot be given. No child- 
ish comment bears a sting, and when it is unfa- 
vourable it is apt to be conveyed in a negative 
and reluctant way. *' Is that lady's back broken ?'' 
asked the little girl about the visitor who had just 
left. ''No? I thought it might be; she's so en- 
tail." And the nurse was referred to, in a hushed 
aside, as ''pretty unpatient and disconsatisfied to- 
day." Little boys seem to be born with a greater 
feeling of independence and less desire to deal 
tenderly with the universe. "How can you be 
naughty when you're just off your knees after 
asking God to make you good?" But the little 
boy answered, sturdily, " I told Him to do it, but 
if He can't do it by Hisself I won't help Him." 

There was a little child who, with eighteen dolls 
of more or less pretensions to wholeness and good 
looks, lavished all her maternal fondness upon a 
small, chipped china hand and arm of some dead 
and vanished child. This disconnected member, 
which went by the name of "Po' baby ahm," was 
carried about all day, wrapped in handkerchiefs 
and tied with ribbons; it was carefully put to bed 
at night, and always had a final and unctuous 
petition offered up to the throne of heaven for its 
protection during the dark hours. It is altogether 

96 



THE CHILD AT PLAY 



impossible to enter into another's scale of values, 
and a wise person will admit his ignorance, stand 
aside and watch, fearful of interference. A little 
boy with many expensive toys may choose to set 
his whole heart upon a broken shell; we cannot 
fathom the reason nor hope to enter into his feel- 
ing, but we can refrain from desecration and stu- 
pidity. Their ways are not as our ways and their 
insight is infinitely clearer. 

The plays of children are best when the grown- 
up accepts his part as the subordinate, takes orders, 
and keeps in the background. In the nursery 
where the grave and the smiling baby lived, the 
most thrilling game took place each evening just 
before supper and the lights were brought. First, 
they demanded a candle with a light to it. Then 
the two little figures in their thin white dresses, 
with their curls somewhat ruffled since the early 
dressing hour and their eyes stretched wide with 
excitement, dragged their little chairs into a dark 
corner behind the door; they set the candle on a 
tiny stand betw^een them, and there, in the little 
darkened space barely big enough to hold them, 
with knees together and the flame at the side 
lighting up their eager faces, they held long, rapt, 
whispered conversations, full of mystery and end- 
ing only with the advent of nurse, supper, and lamp. 
7 97 



THE HUMAN WAY 



The development of the literary instinct in the 
nursery is an invaluable addition to the merriment 
of life, and all children, with due encouragement, 
show ability in the lines of poetry and fiction. 
They are naturally imitative and yet not custom- 
bound, and being far removed from the critical 
faculty they give the original impulse free play. 
They have an instinctive feeling for the mot juste. 
What could have been more exact than the answer 
of the grave baby, who cried out that she heard a 
noise in her room at night, and, on being asked 
what it was like, replied, '' It most ezackly rhymes 
with what a little cricket would say.'' 

How early and how readily they learn the art 
of story-telling and how exciting it is to listen, 
knowing the utter futility of trying to prefigure 
the child's sense of a denouement. *'Once there 
was a mother and her daughter," the grave baby 
told me, ''and the mother was twenty-four and 
the daughter was eighteen, and as they went out 
to walk together a tiger came along; and the 
mother jumped very high over a thousand trees 
and then lived happy ever after, but the daugh- 
ter lived in great misery in the stomach of the 
tiger." 

Again the fable driving home a moral maxim 
is an idea easily annexed by the young, and the 

98 



THE LITERARY INSTINCT 

same baby, having heard a few instances of this 
literary method, told the following thrilling event: 
*' There was a whale and a fish and they was very 
good friends and used to go out bathing together. 
So one day they both saw a crab and they began 
quarrelling about who should have it. And a 
giant was walking along and he heard the fuss, so 
he took off his shoes and stockings quick and 
waded in and said : ' Hullo ! hullo ! What's all this ?' 
And they told him and he pulled out a sword and 
killed them all three. And this is the punishment 
that comes from quarrelling." 

The higher flights of the literary instinct are 
apt to be caught by accident and not received in 
the form of direct narrative or speech. None could 
deny that the form of literature given above was 
of a less high and serious nature than the little 
improvisation, sung by the same child when un- 
conscious of hearers, to a sick doll rocked in the 
hammock : 

"Oh, the queen of heaven bowed down low, 

She bowed down low at night, 
• And gold of heaven shone 'round the babe, 
The triumph babe at night; 
'Tis Jesus is our triumph, 

And so is the sea and sky. 
And angels is our triumph, 
And so is Santa Claus, 
99 



THE HUMAN WAY 



And all vShall come again, 

When I am six years old, 
And I shall lie still in my bed, 

And think beaut if ill words/' 

This was evidently the love of the word for the 
word's sake. The new, mysterious, imported- 
weighted word ** Triumph'' had been presented 
to her. Such was the power and significance in 
the clang of it, that it might mean anything, and 
surely it did include all that was best of the world : 
a babe, Jesus, the sea, the sky, angels, and Santa 
Claus. Again, it was in very truth the literary 
instinct, for she sought no audience. She planned 
to lie still in the dark and think her beautiful words, 
as one does lie in the dark and think of whatever is 
best beloved for its own sake. 

A collection of perfectly naive children's letters 
to any one they love and trust is a most perfect 
mirror of the child's mind and heart. A little 
girl, who used her first big, scrawled, printing let- 
ters to correspond with those who lived in the 
same house with her, wrote: 

"Late lies the flower on the grass 
And its face to a sunbeam 
Shall never more be seen,** 

and tucked it under her father's dinner-plate. Al- 
though she lived a perfectly normal and joyous 

I GO 



THE YOUNG LETTE R-W RIT E R 

child's life and grew up to be a particularly serene 
young girl, her mind remained always vaguely 
open to the inherent sadness in things. That say- 
ing of Pater's that ''were all the rest of man's life 
framed to his liking, he would straightway begin 
to sadden himself over the fate— say, of the flow- 
ers," was particularly true of her nature, and she 
had the resultant quickness of sympathy and fine- 
ness of perception to all the sorrows and humilia 
tions of others. 

The small boy who, like boys generally, con- 
sidered brevity the true mark of manliness and 
who was deeply impressed with the dignity of 
property-holding, wrote in a large, scrawling hand 
which almost filled a page: '*Dear papa, I have a 
pearl - handled knife. Your dutiful and obedient 
son." Up to that time his letters had always been 
signed quite simply, ''Your good boy" or "Your 
loving boy," but with that pearl-handled knife his 
virtues took on a more dignified character. As 
strange, perhaps, as in some after-life our present 
troubles and worries here shall seem to us, must 
appear to the big, grown girl her childish confi- 
dence to the absent mother: "I don't sleep very 
well, I have so many things to think of before I 
grow up — ^how the months come after each other, 
how to get change for big money, and how to be 

lOI 



THE HUMAN WAY 



polite to strangers/' And again she reported the 
iniquity of the smiHng baby: ''We had for our 
Bible lesson to-day the 'Blessed Ares/ and baby 
brother laughed and wouldn't say his, and Mammy 
sent him out the room 'coz he said, 'Blessed are 
the meek and they shall have a new master/'* 

This careful six-year-old mother of a family of 
eighteen dolls sent home to an harassed and over- 
worked father the following genial requests: "Do, 
please, take care of all my precious dolls while I 
am gone, and tell Mammy to feed them well and 
sit by them while they go to sleep, and let them all 
sleep together in my bed. Tell them I miss them 
very much; and tell my go-cart that too. And, 
dear father, will you please have your picture 
taken for me with Mammy and with all my dolls. 
But if that costs too much just have a picture of 
the dolls, for Mother has your picture (I am sorry 
it looks so cross), and I can see Mammy with my 
mind's eye, but I want a picture of my dear dolls 
taken all together and each one separate, just as 
they are. It does not matter that they are some 
broke and that the littlest baby has lost her head. 
I love them just as they are, and I want very good 
pictures, please." 

A tiny boy, away on a farm, wrote home: "I 
saw a cat catch a rat ; she just grabbed him with 

I02 



THE NARRATIVE 



all her finger-nails '' — and the same little boy, touch- 
ed by an ardent sympathy for the father in the 
hot city, wrote: **I ask God every night not to let 
you have yellow fever. I always say 'Wilt thoust,' 
so I guess Hell 'tend to it/' The technique of a 
correct address compassed, he felt that even Deity 
would be merciful. For the same father he in- 
scribed a long tale, formed upon the model of such 
literature as he had absorbed on the subject of a 
saint and a friendly beast. The tale ended dramati- 
cally: *'Then the deer came panting and prancing 
up to the babe, and seeing it, behold, the deer was 
tender and wouldn't fight, but he took up the 
young child and nursed it till it grew to be a fine, 
large, fat saint." 

Once writing becomes a pleasant occupation in 
itself, and an intimate knowledge of the formalities 
of letter- writing a source of pride, parents are apt 
to find small notes put about to waylay them all 
through the day. By the breakfast plate, for in- 
stance: *'Dear Mother, If you are not busy please 
sharpen all my school pencils and believe me al- 
ways, ever cordially yours, C." 

The firelit room and the candle play, the halt- 
ing speech, the grasping intelligence and the tiny 
white-robed figures pass, as all things mortal pass. 
At best there stand in their places ruddy football 

103 



THE HUMAN WAY 



players and girls busy with domestic interests, 
but while it lasts, the sweetest, the most beguiling 
spot upon earth is the nursery. It is a remedy for 
the disease of world- weariness, and a refuge from 
all that is flat, stale, and unprofitable. It is the 
one entirely unforced natural consolation in life. 
It is the eternal promise and the renewing of the 
world. Though all else should fail there are still 
children attempting life and the world afresh, and 
who shall say that some of them may not conquer 
what has vanquished us. 

But the nursery is filled for so short a time that 
before we are half aware, there comes upon us the 
moment when we must send the little folk forth, 
to stand, poor, wee, wayfaring souls, on their own 
merits in an indifferent world. The time when the 
listening home audience gathers up the every ut- 
terance with loving appreciation is all over then, 
and they are judged by the actual pertinency of 
their words. 

Hamlet, being king in the realm of both ideas 
and words, naturally enough felt Polonius nothing 
more than a dry old chatterer, uttering dull, tra- 
ditional saws without vital significance. But a 
time comes in most mature lives when, as we speed 
our young out into the world, the role of Polonius 
seems for the moment to be forced upon us. If, 

104 



POLONIUS'S SAWS 



at the critical instant, we seem to lack the neces- 
sary epigrammatic wisdom or those flashes from 
the infinite that occasionally shed light upon the 
affairs of this finite world, we can at least console 
ourselves with the thougnt that words, except to 
a bom lover of words, are a vanity of vanities, and 
that not our utterances will engrave themselves 
upon the young memories, but our little daily ways 
and habits, our smiles and silences and ordinary 
courses. 

It is futile to drop the burden of our maturer 
comprehension of life upon the young mind about 
to go out from us, for the knowledge of virtue, like 
the knowledge of letters, is progressive, and only 
the prodigy learns his letters from Kant's Critique. 
So, to tell the child as he departs that he projects 
from his own spirit the world into which he is going, 
and that according to the force of this spirit shall 
his control be over that world, is worse than waste- 
ful. Indubitably true as it is, the child will never be- 
lieve it. The illusion of the outer reality is a step 
in nature, and is for certain stages compelling. 
Only after long experience do we grasp that we 
mould the countenances we look upon by the light 
shed from the depths of our own spirits. There is 
nothing to be gained by telling the child that there 
is no true happiness to be had until we have over- 



THE HUMAN WAY 



come fear and desire, for the young person is com- 
pact of desires and the fear that he may miss them. 
Like the rest of us who have attained to Polonius's 
years and wisdom, he must go through the tragic 
discipline of tasting his desires and finding them 
Dead Sea fruit ; he must grasp the prizes of life and 
see them crumble to ashes as he holds them in his 
hands, for in such wise only does the spirit get 
understanding. All the true realisation that the 
flower fadeth and the grass withereth, and that 
man is but a grasshopper on the circle of earth, is a 
later acquisition, and that sense of proportionate 
values which the Catholic Church teaches us is a 
gift of the Holy Ghost can only come to the young 
through miraculous interposition. 

However, truthfulness and good nature are vir- 
tues that may be described and extolled to him, 
and if it be an intelligent child we are addressing 
we may force upon his attention the fact that in 
the eyes of the Almighty one creature is as vital 
as another, and that in as far as he can realise and 
act upon this truth is he likely to find peace and 
harmony in himself. We can offer the child some 
glimpses, too, of the consoling beauty and order of 
the picture in which life is set. There are both 
distraction and solace to be derived from the holy 
method and regularity with which the sun is lifted 

io6 



THE PASSING 



above and dropped below the horizon, from the se- 
cret journeys of the moon by day and its luminous 
wanderings by night, from the lighting up of the 
stars and from the fellowship of beasts and birds 
and plants. We can assure him that life is indeed 
like a garden wherein an industrious insect will 
suck honey and store it away for higher purposes 
of which he may know nothing, and that even if 
there are poison-plants, poison is often medicine. 
But if, as may chance between the aging and 
the budding minds, our best wisdom may emerge 
dusty as Polonius's saws, there is the consolation 
of knowing that atmosphere is more convincing 
than advice, and environment begets safer effects 
than sermons. Moreover, it is not all our own 
fault but a part of the order of nature, that morality 
must be hacked out of the rough block of life anew 
by each workman. Like religion, it is not a great 
thing outside ourselves toward which we may be 
led, but it is the transformation we make of the 
brute facts of life, to return again to the spirit 
which begot us. The generations of man rise and 
pass like a wind, and no man knows whence they 
come or whither they go — but the ethical intent 
of life stands firm and rock-fast, while the wind of 
destiny blows into the world and out again the 
little lives of men. 

107 



THE HUMAN WAY 



And, after all, the main thing for us is to have 
caught the joyous moment on the wing; to have 
taken all the cheer and the solace and the joy of 
the childish companionship, and to have given the 
little budding soul its due share of love and pro- 
tection while we could. 



IV 

FRIENDSHIP 

ONLY the elect among mortals have a sense 
of inborn worth. The God within us, whose 
image we are, is reached only after long search and 
much trial and testing, and in early life while we 
are still but half established upon earth, our sense 
of personal value is the free gift of those who are 
good enough to love us and believe in us and give 
us their friendship. The ver}^ greatest tragedy of 
life is not the breaking of ties, as has so often been 
said, though that is sad enough in all conscience, 
but it is, by misfortune, by infelicity, by unworthi- 
ness, to miss making ties. It is, perhaps, too little 
insistent a truth to us that love is the most signifi- 
cant factor in life. Beauty, riches, luxuries, are 
all good things — they count; but it is love, after 
all, that enhances enjoyment, lends meaning and 
import to beauty, and supplies a reason for being. 
It costs a great price undoubtedly ; we pay heavily 
in anxieties, trepidations, fear of loss, and finally 

109 



THE HUMAN WAY 



we pay also the ultimate price, for we survive the 
loss and go on along the ways that were once ablaze 
and full of sunshine, with only the slant, pale rays 
of memory to light us — and yet, and yet, love is 
worth it. And in love are included all the varying 
grades of feeling from the first social good-will to 
the most exclusive and absorbing friendship. Each 
in its different degree confers value upon life. 

Modern literature, in its emphasis upon court- 
ship and marriage, has made too little of friendship. 
But, after all, courtship and marriage are but the 
preludes to the closest and most lasting of friend- 
ships, and these are, or ought to be, as strenuous in 
service, as full of rites and ceremonies and beauties, 
as courtship. A great deal of care and detail at- 
taches to the forming and maintaining of a real 
friendship, and the average mortal may find it 
calls into play all of courage and skill he has to 
keep the tie of friendship clear and fair and trust- 
ful through the stress and difficulty of life, the 
intermeddling and gossiping and mischief of idlers 
and onlookers. 

But, after all, the difficulty of such adventure 
has its own allurement. If youth presents us with 
easy and ready companionships, maturity makes 
heavy demands. To find a worthy friend and to 
keep that worth ever in mind despite blemishes 

no 



LOVE, THE GENERAL HERITAGE 

and lapses, to hold with a loyalty which is a religion 
by the choice once made, to decorate the -tie with 
the rites of remembrance, is to add one of the 
greatest joys to life. Fidelity is one of man's 
strongest protests against the order of this world 
where all flows past us, where hours and seasons 
alike loom over the horizon line but to drop away 
on the opposite side. Life moves through shifting 
scenery and changing interests, but he who shall 
have held close to some one or two steadfast affec- 
tions, making them stable in a whirling scene, has 
made some claim upon immortality. Through life 
and out into the unknown dream to take one's 
stand upon one faith, one loyalty, one affection, 
is to practise immortality in a fleeting present. 

Love is a more general heritage. It permeates 
all levels and in some way lightens all human lives, 
great or small, noble or mean; it is a natural in- 
stinct, a most obvious impulse; but friendship is 
a rarer, a more difficult achievement, and sets 
sterner requirements to the applicants. It lifts 
the desire of permanence to a more abstract level 
— not bodying forth our tendencies and desires in 
this world, but holding above the storm and stress 
of life a given faith, and the refusal to let it suc- 
cumb to the cruelties of time's processes. 

These, indeed, are becoming less formidable now- 

III 



THE HUMAN WAY 



adays; we are offered on all sides theories of pre- 
natal existences and long sequences of lives. We 
are familiar with the insistent repetition of this 
theory throughout Browning's poetry. To him 
it seemed the only possible justification of the 
broken arc of this life. This plausible theory 
remedies a little the dizziness of a monotonous for- 
ever, while it yet saves a man from the lax belief 
that life is a futile game ending in nothing. Even 
though these theories do no more than cater to 
the human propensity to see in quantitative units 
rather than in endless expanse, at least they in- 
tensify the interest of the moment and give one 
a sense that life, with all its disappointments and 
limitations, is but an incident. ''If, therefore,'' 
writes a recent author, ''two people love one an- 
other in this life, we have, on the assumption that 
they are immortal, good reason for believing that 
their other lives are bound up with one another, 
not for one life only, but forever. This would not 
involve their meeting in every life any more than 
it would involve that they should meet every day 
of each life. Love can survive occasional absences 
and is often the stronger for them." To those who 
like to think in wide realms, there is some fascina- 
tion in this idea. It has the expansive charm of 
that prospective meeting in "Evelyn Hope": 

112 



A SEQUENCE OF LIVES 



"Delayed it may be for more lives yet, 

Through worlds I shall traverse not a few; 
Much is to learn and much forget, 

Ere the time be come for taking you." 

An undoubted service of this speculation is the 
scope it offers the romancer. What a long breath 
of relief we draw when we hear of a whole series of 
lives in which a man may go on acquiring experi- 
ence, building up a character or capacity, increas- 
ing his knowledge or practising his virtues! This 
is literally the ''wages of going on, and not to 
die.'' As to the love stories, obstacles providing 
wholesome absences and delays are indefinitely in- 
creased. The direction taken by the impetus of 
the soul may separate two well-meaning and loving 
personalities until only by describing a complete 
circle in the heavens may they return to the point 
upon which they originally agreed. 

Some writer has recently put tests to those con- 
templating marriage. ''If you can laugh together, 
weep together, see the sunset together," he says, 
"it is safe." But for marriage or for friendship, 
the test, to be perfect, should include, "If you can 
walk together and read together." The weeping 
together is the least important test. We can weep 
with so many people. Tears, after all, are ready 
and pity is easy, and a harder task is to live in the 
8 113 



THE HUMAN WAY 



comedy that lies above the level of the tragic. As 
to looking at the sunset and reading together, every 
great eulogy of friendship in English poetry is 
founded on the fact that the friends shared the 
same love of beauty and the same devotion to the 
Muse. From Milton to Arnold, the great English 
elegies commemorate, as the chief joys and dignities 
of friendship, a love of beauty and a pursuit of 
nobility. 

The common enthusiasm for beauty, the shared 
faculties, are the chief bonds of a friendship. And 
enthusiasm is easier in buoyant youth than in dis- 
illusioned age. As life spins past us it is natural 
that coldness invade us and hopefulness be less 
joyously upspringing. We who have lived must 
have seen the multiplication of sins and of sorrows, 
must have learned to renounce many partisanships 
and to shrug our shoulders while the world wags 
on its own way ; the soil of a man's heart by ordi- 
nary processes is like to become fit for negations 
and indifference. How have things we set our 
faith upon crumbled and betrayed us; how have 
our friends passed out into the unknown, inscrut- 
able future! As for our desires, either we cannot 
attain them and in their stead a sense of black 
failure and thwarting lives in us, or we do attain 
them and find them bitter as Dead Sea fruit in our 

114 



THE COMMON CULT 



hands — ^useless and gray as wind-blown ashes pow- 
dering our blossoms. To this pass must we all 
come at some time — all except those very brisk and 
busy folk who do things so hard that they have 
not time to look up or down or round about, and 
so manage to get through existence without dis- 
criminating between beauty and ugliness at all. 
These people, it has been said, make the world go 
round; possibly they do, but one thing is certain, 
they do not make it swing to music, and if the earth 
joins the stars in the chorus of the spheres, it is 
not their doing. 

At any rate, with these we are not dealing, but 
with those who in the willing service of friendship 
constantly discriminate between what is fair and 
enlivening and what is ugly and deadening. If we 
will have life repay us, even to the last, when age 
and decay encroach, then il faut cuUiver son jardin 
— we must be unremitting gardeners of life, we 
must hoard beauties, we must keep record of them 
as they flit, we must be ever alert to catch the 
essence of the rare and worthy moment and to pro- 
long its life in memory and in written annals or 
imitative images. If we ourselves live largely by 
the past, we also are creating in turn a new past 
for posterity, and it matters infinitely that our 
legacy to them should be beautiful ; not merely use- 

IIS 



THE HUMAN WAY 



ful or labour-saving or protective, but that it should 
have in it that beauty and harmony which alone 
can console us in age, and make life, looked back 
upon from the vantage of half a century of years, 
a feast of exquisite though transient impressions. 

No; when the paralysis of old age creeps upon 
us and our hopes no longer live on the mere animal 
spirits of youth, it is the beauty we may have 
snatched together by the way which shall con- 
sole us and hearten us and bind us closer. Com- 
fort and successes wear as thin as poverty and 
failures if we have placed our faith in mere material 
things : 

*'Just when we're safest there's a sunset totich^ 
A fancy from a fiower-bell, some one's death, 
A chorus-ending from Euripides — 
And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears 
As old and new at once as Nature's self 
To rap and knock and enter in our soul, 
Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring 
Round the ancient idol on his base again — 
The grand Perhaps!" 

Only such beauty as we have found and treas- 
ured can keep the heart in us and our friendship 
alive — either the beauties we have read of or seen 
or pondered ; or, if we be of the most fortunate of 
the sons of men, the beauties we have created, or 
seeing, have known how to give account of. 

ii6 



THE SHARED PURSUIT 



There is one vital truth about friendship: it is 
never based upon evil. Let a woman prefer gossip 
to service, and a man gain to honoiir, and they may 
get a good deal out of it; they may have acquaint- 
ances and companions, but friends they cannot 
have. Friendship, by its nature, implies a common 
pursuit of noble ends. It is permanent, and evil 
is always transitory; the temporary vestment of 
illusion which, bit by bit, we strip from ourselves; 
and whoever lowers our ideals or lessens our faith 
in good must and will perish out of our lives. Some 
one to whom I said this replied that many of the 
most sublime instances of friendship could be drawn 
from the annals of the meanest, most elementary 
natures. And this is quite true, for there is no 
stage of human life so low but that even there men 
posit an ideal and hold to it. The loyalty and 
good faith, the self-immolation in the cause of 
friendship shown among the thieves and liars of 
Gorki's Ex-men is one of the great strokes of his 
genius. Even there friendship means an ideal, so 
revered that even life itself may be lightly laid down 
in its service. Such folk have often, too, one of 
the greatest privileges of friendship, that of loving 
a person whom no one else can love— of standing 
firm upon one's own judgment of worth, of seeing 
what perhaps only God and one's self can see, 

117 



THE HUMAN WAY 



the worth and the value of the despised and re- 
jected. 

Than this, there is but one more difficult demand 
of friendship: the power to love our friend in his 
greatest prosperity. It may seem almost too mean 
a frailty to mention, and yet I have seen it in folk 
of many finenesses; they could stand by a friend 
in misfortune but they could not stand by him 
when the sim shone on him. Envy sometimes di- 
vorces friends who stand all the tests of suffering. 
This is an ignoble thing, and makes one shame- 
faced to mention, but it is true. And there is an- 
other demand — that of bearing with our friend's 
failings. A staunch faith is as much a virtue in 
friendship as it is in religion. We must deliber- 
ately and with wilful intent fix the mind on our 
friend's finer traits, accepting him for better and 
for worse as we do the unfathomable universe, 
hoping that somehow his failings are but good in 
the making. 

There is in the Katha Upanishad a very ancient 
prayer of two friends which one notes not so much 
for fervour as for its touching content. ''May He 
protect us both,'' it begins, and continues, ''May 
He enjoy us both." One msiy search the collects 
of the Church in vain for a parallel to this — a sense 
of care for the joy of God. To be sure, the Cal- 

ii8 



AN ANCIENT PRAYER 



vinistic catechism opens up grandly with the whole 
duty of man, which is to glorify God and enjoy 
Him forever; but that, after all, is still for the 
benefit of the creature, though it might be tacitly 
intended to make for the fuller joy of the Creator. 
True it is, that one of the stock questions for self- 
examination of the Calvinist-bred conscience is 
whether the soul could accept eternal damnation 
for the glory of God, but this is at best a sorry 
enjoyment to extend to our Creator, and there is 
apt to be a lurking sense that one's willingness is 
likewise one's means of escape. Still, the extent 
to which one is willing to suffer that another may 
rejoice is the ultimate test of sincerity of affection. 
But the real point of this ancient prayer seemed 
to be the desire to hold a human relation at so high 
a level that the Creator Himself might be glad 
in it. 

''May our wisdom grow bright together,'* the 
little prayer continues. It has been pointed out 
to us that in as far as we suffer only from limitation 
and imperfection, our Creator must suffer with us 
and in us, so that the interests of God and man 
would, in the last analysis, be identical, and as our 
wisdom brightens this joy becomes fuller. Indeed, 
we can only think of His tmtroubled perfection 
while we struggle if we accept some view in which 

119 



THE HUMAN WAY 



the threads of sorrow and mistake enwoven in the 
tapestry of life are but the necessary contrasts and 
shadows which complete the beauty of the whole. 
But, even so, the thought of adding to the sum of 
light and perfection in creation, by our human re- 
lations, is a powerful stimulus toward fineness of 
conduct and thought. 

It is a common thing for people to be restrained 
from unworthy deeds and ungentle speech by con- 
sideration for another's feeling; they shrink from 
witnessing immediate and visible pain. But a less 
usual care is that the whole stretch of a relation- 
ship be kept, across the gulf of years — aye, for a 
lifetime, mayhap — a matter of such beauty that 
**He may enjoy us both." 

Life, after all, is made of the intricate relations 
in which we stand to other men; not of things, 
nor yet of activities, tasks, and pleasures. Many 
and various, major and minor as these relations 
may be, there yet remains not only an aspect of 
conduct suitable to each, but a definite choice as 
to the plane of exaltation upon which each relation- 
ship shall be held. If exaltation is a level many 
fear, where, as on all heights, the vision may easily 
swim and the thoughts grow heady, yet when 
we contemplate the sordidness and flatness which 
paint in dull drab the recurrent days of average 

120 



EFFORT 



life, we grow to feel that even a fall from a dizzy 
height may be better than the w^eary dragging of 
the feet across a dusty plain. 

And to keep a relation at point of exaltation re- 
qiiires effort. No one has ever yet drifted into 
nobility. No one, sad as it may seem, has ever 
achieved a fine and lasting friendship any more 
than a complete marriage, a close and helpful bond 
of parent and child, without a conscious struggle; 
for a fine relation shoots out beyond the necessary 
and obvious duties and decorates itself with works 
of supererogation. These are the tasks that a man 
in love instinctively performs. In that state of 
divine enthusiasm the set limits of duty seem a 
hopelessly meagre expression of the surplus emo- 
tion. But being in love, like all enthusiasms, is of 
the spirit, and the wind of the spirit bloweth where 
it listeth and cannot be counted upon to abide. 
The gift of such visitation of emotion is a chance 
and casual comer to poor mortality, though doubt- 
less if this were paradise each human being would 
perennially be in some such fervent frame of mind 
toward every other being. But, under earthly con- 
ditions, it sets the nerves to irritated tingling, and 
by its very unwontedness sets the brain to invent- 
ing rhymes. To follow Cupid for his loaves and 
fishes is not feasible as a permanent pursuit, and 

121 



THE HUMAN WAY 



the true task is to turn the spontaneous glow 
of feeling into a steady current of ready sym- 
pathy and acceptable service through all the 
days. 

Effort, then, is the first condition of an adequate 
human relation. Perhaps the power of unselfish 
enjoyment is the second. Nothing so smooths the 
roughness out of the path of life as the gift of ready 
humour untouched by malice. Half the melo- 
dramas and turbulent tragedies of existence are 
done away with by the wholesome habit of greet- 
ing life's incongruities with laughter. ''Not even 
their pains must make them sorrowful,'' writes an 
old Italian poet of true lovers, and the maxim holds 
even more steadfastly true of the less enthusiastic 
relations in life — those slower feelings, standing off 
from the momentary impulse while they stead- 
fastly build and laboriously cement the temple of 
their harmony. 

Another truth upon which all satisfactory friend- 
ship is based is the settled conviction that it is not 
what is given us that adds to the joy of being and 
the sacredness of life, but what we give. It is in- 
finitely better to have felt without return than to 
have accepted without feeling. It is just this inde- 
pendence of the perfect relation, its power of creat- 
ing and completing its own existence, which makes 

122 



THE IMPREGNABLE ARCH 

steadily more and more, as we realise it, for the 
fulness of enjoyment. 

And since we accept it that we are to give with- 
out thought of receiving, so ought we also to insist 
on giving our best. It is one of the errors of friend- 
ship to fancy any mood good enough for the friend. 
*'He will know what I mean!'' Doubtless! But 
it is none the less blasphemy to offer a friend less 
than our noblest. '' With your friend you will wear 
no garment?'' cries Zarathustra. *'To honour him 
you show yourself as you are ? Nay ; rather must 
ye fear nakedness. Only the gods dare discard 
their raiment. For your friend you cannot adorn 
yourself too richly, since you must be to him an 
arrow and an aspiration toward super-man." The 
reserves which mean courtesy, restraint and beauty 
are due to our friend much more than they are to 
the chance outsider. It is not insincerity but re- 
spect which leads us to hide from our friend the 
insignificant sordid details, the feeble moods and 
reiterant frailties. To him we love is due our 
highest and noblest self. 

Any two who share their struggles and their 
aspirations build better than they know. Man 
projects his interests far above himself, and to 
meet and lean against kindred interests at a height 
forms an impregnable arch of accomplishment and 

123 



THE HUMAN WAY 



power. In every way, the life of friendship is the 
acquisition of double vitality, for it is to have all 
one's own mind, and all another's. But it can 
only be based upon a fundamental, inborn likeness 
and such circumstances as shall establish and in- 
crease the likeness. Montaigne tells a tale of one 
Eudamidos, who had two friends. Eudamidos, be- 
ing on his death-bed, and very poor, made a will 
in which he bequeathed: ''To Aretheus the keep- 
ing of my mother, and to maintain her when she 
shall be old; to Charixeus the marrying of my 
daughter and to give her as great a dower as he 
may; and in case he shall chance to die before, I 
appoint the survivor to substitute his charge and 
supply his place.'' Carixeneus did indeed die five 
days later, and Aretheus maintained the mother 
and adopted the daughter; and ''Of five talents 
that he had he gave two and a half in marriage to 
one only daughter that he had, but the other two 
and a half to the daughter of Eudamidos, whom 
he married, both in one day." St. Gregory said: 
"Love giveth great gifts, else it is not love," and 
doubtless a friendship that would question of much 
or of little in service would be a very poor matter. 
It is the law of price that our greatest expansion 
and deepest joy should likewise cost our keenest 
suffering. High emotions come hand in hand, and 

124 



THE INVISIBLE PAIN 



who dares love much must likewise be willing to 
suffer much. But does not the greatest expansion 
of life come through pain ? To lose a perfect com- 
panionship is to accept the greatest of human sor- 
rows, and with it the greatest exaltation and ex- 
pansion of soul. It means, indeed, to live a life 
of daily death. 

"Since the time I lost him," writes Montaigne, 
"I doe but languish; I doe but sorrow; and even 
those pleasures all things present me with, instead 
of yielding me comfort, doe but redouble the grief 
of his losse. We were copartners in all things. 
All things were with us at half; methinks I have 
stolen his past from him. I w^as so accustomed to 
be ever two and so enured to be never single that 
methinks I am but half myselfe.*' 

And Tennyson, feeling the pain of so profotmd 
a division, writes: 

** Behold I dream a dream of good, 

And mingle all the world with thee. 

"Thy voice is on the rolling air, 

I hear thee when the waters run; 
Thou standest in the rising sun, 
And in its setting thoti art fair.'* 

The very pain of loss seems to bring to the birth 
that quickened and multiplied perception which 

125 



THE HUMAN WAY 



gives us hold upon a life beyond ourselves. We 
can, at need, conceive of ourselves as dead, but of 
our friend we know of a full surety that death it- 
self could die sooner than he. He passes beyond 
our touch only to reappear in every beautiful sight 
and uplifted thought with intensified presence. If 
we pluck a flower, we see it still with his eyes and 
our own. If we watch the starry heavens, we know 
him there and still in us ; and we begin to feel the 
mystery of being, the unity of — 

"The search and the sought and the seeker 
The sotil and the body that is." 

For more than all else a true friendship will initiate 
us into some sort of sense of immortality. No 
mortal experience can give us comprehension of it, 
but to lose, into the unknown and unfathomable, 
that which was dearer to us than our own life and 
our own consciousness is to come as near as v/e 
may to a feeling of immortality. 

Hearn, in his letters, exclaims: ''There is no 
singular — no ' L' ' F is surely collective. . . . When 
you felt the charm of that tree and that lawn, 
many who would have loved you were they able 
to live as in other days were looking through you 
and remembering happy things." When, then, we 
are accepting the sorrows of the world, are we, per- 

126 



EXALTATION 



haps, letting unseen visitants work out to the end 
their old, time-worn griefs and abasements? Are 
they looking through our eyes and saying: ''Not 
only is this life; it was life long ago; it has been 
life since ever men looked at the structure of the 
world?'' If a man has power to change by his 
effort or his strength or his will any of these things, 
shall he, perhaps, be hushing to sleep old griefs and 
healing age-long hurts, so that in the end men may 
hope that even that great thing that seemingly 
rolls so independently by them. Life, may become 
a matter for transformation? And in how far is 
it worth while to take thought about life? What 
can thought do for the brute struggle with chaos 
and grief and destruction outside the doors ? If it 
be of any value at all it must fulfil two functions. 
It must offer rest and refreshment in the realms 
of wisdom and love to fortify a man to bear the 
spectacle of so much defeat. And more than that, it 
must teach us to enter the battle from time to time, 
extending, however little, the realms of wisdom and 
love; pushing an inch away the barriers of chaos 
and destruction; gathering up hope and courage 
and good-will and pardon, even to the tiniest frag- 
ments, that nothing be lost that may avail for the 
ultimate solidarity of humankind. And when fin- 
ally each man's sorrow and need are every man's 

127 



THE HUMAN WAY 



sorrow and need, some new light may be shed on 
the inevitable ills — change and mutability, parting 
and death; then more freedom may be given us 
along the ways of what we call the infinite. 

And what is friendship preparing us for ? Does 
it not really happen that when the bodily life ceases 
to make its claims the invisible life expands and 
increases till a sure sense of companionship, full 
and complete, grows up in us? We have an idle 
habit of thinking of the soul as a tiny spark, an in- 
habitant almost imperceptible dwelling in the body. 
But does the reality not seem to be far nearer to 
that pictured by the great poet, just deceased: 

''The body (I might say) is immersed in the soul 
as a wick is dipped in oil, and its flame of active 
energy is increased or diminished by the strength 
or weakness of the fecundizing soul. But the oil, 
this soul, is enriched an hundredfold by the infu- 
sion of the holy spirit ; the human will is intensified 
by union with the divine will — the universal will — 
and for the flame of human love or active energy 
is substituted the intenser flame of divine love and 
divine energy." 

Does it not truly happen that by living, by ac- 
quiescing, a kind of heavenly magnetisation takes 
place, drawing the needle of our compass till it 
points unwavering toward that larger will which 

128 



THE GREAT COMPANIONSHIP 

is not our own ? So that in lieu of the clamour and 
frail succour of man's human companionship we 
learn to be aware of the invisible presence that 
dwells so close to us, and is audible in the hush and 
discernible in the dark — that presence which even 
to try to express outwardly for a moment is to 
diminish its being, since it seems always that man's 
silence is nearest to God's speech. 

And who shall assure us that when we shake off 
the dust of the body and turn deaf ears to all 
sounds, which are but the foam on the ocean of 
silence, we shall not actually see, with some sense 
undreamed of by our earthly sight, the invisible 
companion, who has holden us through the thick 
darkness, borne with our foolishness and ignorance, 
comforted our loneliness, and guided us in safety to 
the ultimate bourne ? 



V 
HUMAN RELATIONS 

IT is a depressing thing to watch humanity as it 
streams past us on the street. To jostle one's 
kind in thoroughfares and in shops is to see hu- 
manity in the gross and under one of its least 
pleasing aspects. To see so many faces all strained, 
over-eager, self-absorbed — or worse, drab, dreary, 
futile, lack-lustre — gives one pause instinctively to 
ask: *'Why do they live? What makes the dull 
driving worth while?'' It is a sad panorama, this 
endless whirl of tired people, ugly and disfigured 
by the exigencies of life. The unceasing struggle 
has rubbed off the bloom of life, and as we look in 
their faces we see there all the marks of living 
either in the glamour of the past or the hope for 
the future. The present moment seems but a dull 
thud of time to be endured while they press on to 
the next. So, one by one, the moments drip away, 
and this they call life. There seem to be too many 
of us in this great ill-differentiated mass of people, 

130 



THE SAD PANORAMA 



all unsmiling, hurrying, eager to attain an unseen 
goal, and pushing toward it as if harried by an 
invisible thong. 

What an experience it would be, what an en- 
livening and enriching experience, to peer be- 
hind the ugly mask and see what lay back of 
the stupid haste and seemingly useless activity! 
If one were free to stop a man and demand the 
heart of his motive and his deep-hidden desire, 
what significance would be added to the scene ! If 
for a moment one might but play the part of the 
fairy in the old tales and grant each m.an a single 
wish, what a strange insight one would gain into 
the life beneath the dull appearance! **What one 
thing will you have to make you happy ?'' we should 
ask. It might be money, or health, or power to 
stay tha approach of death, or toys, or jewels, or 
the annihilation of time and space, but one thing 
we should learn: each one's w4sh would include 
another than himself. No one wishes all alone. 
Behind the mask, after all, a spirit hides, shy, 
elusive, exquisite, debonair, easy to overlook; but, 
once lighted upon, the spirit justifies humanity 
even as wisdom, were it accessible, might. It is 
not splashing over our dingy fates with a dash of 
romance that lends life dignity, but it is the dis- 
covery that the endless chain of human relation- 

131 



THE HUMAN WAY 



ships is never snapped off. If we were free to mark 
our man and follow him home, we should find there 
that all the activity of his being includes another 
than himself — some one to whom he lends strength 
and protection. And that needier one, we should 
find him, too, passing on the solaces of the way to 
some one yet frailer, more adrift upon the spinning 
planet. So, if we search beneath mere surfaces, 
we do actually get the sense of being members of 
one body. If the outside of life is often dishearten- 
ing, somewhat spattered over with clay and pow- 
dered with dust, at the core of life we find a point 
of relief, the tenderness of each man for his own, 
the tiny wavering flame of affection, the pious rite, 
the unquenchable ideal. 

It need not greatly matter that as yet we have 
not got much further than the occasional glimpse 
of the divine spark, that the surfaces of human 
relations are still rough and jagged, and that the 
fewest of men feel anything but the immediate 
connecting links in the chain of human solidarity. 
We must remind ourselves that life's processes are 
slow, and a thousand years in His sight but as one 
day. The tiger in human nature takes a long time 
to kill utterly. The sense of man's relationship to 
man is steadily expanding, as we see by the many 
organisations of responsibility and helpfulness. 

132 



BEHIND THE MASK 



Of course, the most natural bonds to humanity 
are the ties of blood and kinship with which a man 
is born in the home plot, where the roots of life 
shoot down and draw nourishment and being. 
Where these are natural and happy, a man starts 
life with an immeasurable advantage. To have 
** folks,*' in the Yankee phrase, to start life loving 
and beloved by them, is to begin with home and 
property — a happy point of departure for further 
relations. And the ties of blood, because they are 
the first and the strongest, can never be torn 
asunder without agony; for man, however his opin- 
ions may differ from those of his kin, cannot do 
away with the ties which make him, after all, one 
of his own tribe. There is the sacred likeness of 
voice and gesture, habits of speech and outlines 
of body; there are the preferences reminiscent of 
the ancient common life, the memories and asso- 
ciations, the predilections and aversions owned in 
common. That such bonds should be broken at 
times is inevitable, but it is futile to try to mini- 
mise the pain it must bring. Indeed, one turns 
again in a circle here. It is with all human relations 
even as it is with friendships: just in proportion 
as they are capable of giving us joy, so also is their 
power great to give us pain. It is a wise man indeed, 
who learns to suck the honey and escape the poison. 

133 



THE HUMAN WAY 



But even a very little experience of life teaches 
us to avoid unnecessary pangs and to escape exag- 
gerated agonies. He is the clever man who, if he 
has to suffer, suffers to some purpose and wears an 
impenetrable armour against unnecessary sensitive- 
ness. There was once a pretty French maid with 
an unruffled, rose - petalled face, who for many 
years held a position deemed by outsiders next 
to impossible. When the temperamental horizon 
about her blackened, and the lightning whizzed and 
the thunder clapped, she raised a round, dimpled 
chin an inch higher into the air, and pursued her 
vocation stolidly, commenting, ''What I care?'* 
The results were excellent. The storms beat about 
her, but they did not beat her. In much the same 
way a sturdy young Swedish girl was put in a posi- 
tion where at least a dozen young American women 
had failed and retreated because it was *'too aw- 
ful'* or ''too impossible,'* and her only comment 
was, "I have seen w^orse." What worse had been, 
to school her to such fine indifference was never 
divulged, but, at least, all observers knew that 
it had served a purpose; it had clothed her in a 
saving armour, and she succeeded where others 
failed. 

Suffer one must and shall, since only so may a 
man lift himself from a beast to a spirit, but it lies 

134 



THE ARMOUR OF INDEPENDENCE 

with us to choose whether we shall expend our 
life -energy in futile and wasteful suffering, or 
whether we shall suffer for a worthy cause and to 
good purpose. To cry over a spoiled dinner or a 
cut finger leaves less emotion ready for a national 
calamity or a devastating earthquake. To worry 
or fret over our own or our children's worldly pros- 
perity and educational advantages, robs us of clear 
and unbiassed strength to distinguish amongst rel- 
ative values and to know the real from the illu- 
sive. Each man needs to weave a garment for 
his own sensitiveness ; he must wrap it round, and 
be able to retort to the small finger-shakings of 
Fate, ''What I care?'' Why should any one break 
his heart over a misunderstanding? It would be 
nothing more than a foolish waste of hearts! All 
human relations are not worth tinkering at all the 
time. If they are inclined to snap, there is nothing 
to do but let them go and hope they link on else- 
where. To be misunderstood by a man, or a 
hundred men, or a thousand, is, if one faces it 
bravely, no more than to be misunderstood by so 
many men. What matters is, that, despite all op- 
position and all difficulty, one should be able to 
face one's self unashamed, and present at the end of 
life a fairly wrought body of feeling, honestly and 
bravely cherished. Let the small events pass as 

13s 



THE HUMAN WAY 



they will on the whistling winds of chance ; do not 
lend too anxious an ear to the moods and vagaries 
of other men, but pursue with imabated vigour the 
chosen aims, w^orking diligently on those affections 
in life that are in your own hands to mould, and 
leave the rest to fate or Providence, chance or 
destiny. We cannot keep perfect every chance 
relation, and often we must accept passive en- 
durance as the part we have to play. 

There is indeed a limit to the area where a man 
may work upon his own life, and it would be hard 
to overestimate the value of a wise passiveness, 
a staunch faith, a strong indifference, when the 
limit is reached. If all that seems most beautiful 
and worthy of treasuring to us is yet subject to the 
law of mutability, it is well to meet the fact with 
courage, since no effort alters it. It is wasteful 
to expend emotion on futile regrets. We cannot 
control the coming and the passing of other men, 
or the turn of their desires ; but we can control our- 
selves, and the less strength we expend in crying 
out upon the inevitable the more power we shall 
have. 

To the religious soul, to the mortal who yearns 
after the perfection of human relations, there is no 
greater sorrow than this — that a part of our hu- 
man limitation is the necessity for discarding imper- 

136 



INCOMPLETE RELATIONS 

feet and incomplete relations, for facing and ad- 
mitting our mistakes of choice and letting them 
go. We must, it would seem cold-heartedly, select 
companions. We must distinguish between those 
with whom we practice a reciprocal give and take, 
and those to whom we can minister. Indeed, we 
must distinguish as well those who merely bend 
down to us ; we must treasure the passing blessing 
and make no claims. But in all these varying 
grades of intercourse a man can refrain from open 
cruelty. He need never be, as the Sutta says, 
"Harsh spoken and like a beast, delighting in in- 
juries of others.'' There are, if a man hunt for 
them, gentle and delicate modes of distinction that 
leave no wounds. For in the end the great con- 
sideration of life is that we should not increase the 
sum of its pain. The austerest withdrawals, made 
in silence, have not the harshness, the positive ugli- 
ness, of speech; and there is much of life too in- 
evitably sad for w^ords, over which it is best a veil 
should be thrown. 

And again, no exigency can ever arise which calls 
for vengeance. To return a wrong by another 
wrong has never, by any mathematical computa- 
tion, made other than two wrongs in the world. To 
imagine that a man can enrich himself by robbery 
is sheer intellectual stultification. Whatever a 

137 



THE HUMAN WAY 



man takes from another to the other's loss and 
detriment becomes the impoverishment of the rob- 
ber, paradoxical as it may sound, and another's suf- 
fering can never be our gain. We have but to look 
at the spiritual pauperism of the unrighteously rich 
to know this. Long before Christianity formulated 
the right doctrine of revenge, the true spirit existed 
in the Eastern religions, and yet even to-day man 
goes on hopefully returning an injury with an in- 
jury, trusting that a right will emerge. The He- 
brew law was an eye for an eye and a tooth for a 
tooth, but the Supreme Sage said, if any man take 
thy coat, give him thy cloke also. 

To average man a sage's ideas are apt to look 
chimerical, until little by little, here and there, they 
filter through, are acted upon enough to show their 
visible truth, and then they also become facts — the 
tangible, practical truths of living. The relation 
of idea to fact is not antithetical, it is merely pro- 
gressive, like the relation of future to past. The 
fact is the thing done, made, finished ; the standing, 
brute obstacle in the world, against which the idea 
hurls itself. The fact, being created, is outside us, 
has apparently a separate life and being of its own, 
while the idea is still in us, intimate, pliable, within 
our grasp to project at will into the future, and by 
transforming and creating we get a new and larger 

138 



REVENGE 



objective world. But the truth remains, that it is 
the idea that creates new facts and transforms past 
ones. It may take centuries to bring about a 
large enough aggregate of ideas to produce a self- 
evident fact, but it is none the less sure that the 
thinking, the ideals, of people of to-day are the 
facts and the truths of to-morrow. 

So revenge, if one ponder upon it, is just a false 
computation of past ages. It is many centuries 
since it was corrected, and authoritatively. '' But 
I say unto you that ye resist not evil.'' And this 
really works the only effective revenge. The most 
scorching sorrow that can befall a man is to come 
to a realising sense of his own unworthiness ; and 
this comes not when he is injured, not when he sees 
violence and anger and passions like his own, but 
when, by chance, he enters into the presence of 
purity and renunciation. There is great truth in 
the answer Tolstoi offered those who asked him if 
he would remain quiescent if he saw a man brutally 
killing a child. He said, '*He wouldn't kill it if 
I were passing." Mildness and wisdom, love and 
renunciations, have their own lightnings and their 
scorching and penetrating powers, if man would 
but rely upon them. And only these lightnings 
have heat and smelting and fusing power. These 
conquer the enemy by winning him over to us, and 

139 



THE HUMAN WAY 



his life and ours is enlarged. By every human 
being one can love and bring into further life, one 
is richer; by every death or partial death caused 
by anger or alienation, one is stripped; and isola- 
tion is the ultimate tragedy of life, the final result 
of sin. Wherever a beneficent relation is main- 
tained between two human beings, a link is forged 
in the chain which stretches between humanity 
and divinity; wherever hatred or injury comes, a 
link is snapped. 

Let the red slayer think he slays. But it is all 
futile. The deed comes back to the doer, and the 
thought returns upon the thinker, and love comes 
home to the lover, and the crime belongs to the 
criminal ; and each man rears the walls of his spir- 
it's temple, and the spirit is confined within them 
till it grows too large and rends its own work and 
begins anew on a larger basis. This is the great 
revenge, to hide in the shelter of the silence and 
the mystery ; acts entail further acts, and we be- 
come drawn into the mesh of human intricacies and 
partialities. But in the far quiet there is peace for 
the slain while the slayer wraps about himself the 
gray isolation of his acts, and out of his errors 
come the sufferings which are the birth-throes of 
new consciousness. 

But that vengeance is foolish and a mere multi- 

140 



PARTISANSHIP 



plication of wrongs does not mean that any brave 
man can get through life without partisanship at 
times. The world depends for growth and progress 
upon those who refuse to keep the peace where 
there is no peace, who cry aloud in the wilderness 
and the market-place, '' Make straight the way of the 
Lord.'' They expose shams, proclaim dishonour, 
entrap the wicked, run risks and accept calamities ; 
but to them, too, though the momentary voice in- 
vites confusion and disruption, to them we owe 
largely such peace and comfort and honour as have 
been built up. Without them the world would be- 
come marish and stagnant. 

''Taking sides,'' exclaimed an enthusiastic young 
lady, *'is the loveliest thing on earth; it makes life 
worth living." Certainly to live with zeal and 
enthusiasm is to live successfully; and to do so 
means that one must choose sides and throw the 
weight of one's personality into the balance— ad- 
vance one end of life and thwart its opposite. But 
since this is so, what is the value of that religious 
attitude called quietism, indifferentism, of which 
we hear so much ? Why is it that some great peo- 
ple of the world, men like Epictetus and Aurelius, 
walk in an atmosphere of large calm and serenity ? 
Why is it that all the small turmoils and bustling 
disturbances of life seem to gather round and over- 

141 



THE HUMAN WAY 



whelm little undecided folk? When one tries to 
answer these questions one is reminded of a youth 
who was baffled in his pursuit of the literary- 
career, and who turned to a wise and philosophic 
old lady and asked, ''Have you no sympathy with 
failure?'' ''Oh yes,'' she replied; "yes, I have 
sympathy with large failures." So it seems to be 
with partisanship — turmoils and disturbances and 
petty frettings and fumings attend small partisan- 
ships, but strength, peace, and wide outlook come 
from taking sides when the largeness of the cause 
justifies us. I am not denying the belittling effects 
of mere clanship, of standing by a friend, or even 
one's country, right or wrong. Family feeling is a 
most excellent arrangement of Providence for the 
comfort and strengthening of the individual, though 
in the last analysis it is really a further extension 
of egotism. Friendship founded on any lower basis 
than common pursuit of noble ends is only a little 
human adjustment for diversion and well-being. 
But who is a friend and a brother? Is it he who 
admires and upholds us, right or wrong, or is it he 
who will demand the best of us and have it at any 
cost? 

Three ways there are that lead a man from the 
pernicious nagging of self-interest ; three paths that 
make toward increasing the sum of the worth of 

142 



THE GREAT CAUSE 



the world; three roads always worth finding and 
following : the disinterested and self -annulling pur- 
suits of beauty, of virtue, and of truth. 

That such pursuits sometimes err cannot detract 
from their worth. Any lost cause is a good enough 
one to die for if it be disinterestedly chosen ; and if 
nothing else is gained, a man or a company of men 
have been relieved from the immediate pressure of 
the sense of self. Wherever a great cause mixes 
itself up with small matters and unessentials it loses 
force and power. Wherever narrow-mindedness 
and one-sidedness dictate the terms of party spirit, 
there the worth and nobility of the cause shrink. 
Savonarola would have been a greater reformer if 
he had not been afraid of jewels and pictures. 
Measure the difference between a partisanship such 
as Savonarola's and such an one as St. Francis's. 
St. Francis took sides, too. He sided against 
luxury and class distinction and wealth and politi- 
cal hierarchies, and he sided with mercy and pity 
and truth and love, and the brotherhood of the 
world; and he was so alive with the zeal of this 
partisanship that the small things, the unessentials, 
escaped him altogether. 

If, to live effectively, one must decide on some- 
thing one believes worth living and dying for, and 
then pursue the mark without abatement, one must 

143 



THE HUMAN WAY 



choose a cause that will last, that can stand fire and 
water and even the clear light of eternity. That 
partisanship alone is worth while which fixes con- 
sciousness upon the good aimed at rather than the 
evil to overcome. If we find that we must stand 
through life with our heel set upon struggling 
wrong, at least we can put all our joy not in the 
tyrant beneath our foot, but in the hovering good 
toward which we look. Perhaps to be a partisan 
and yet to avoid unkindness is best accomplished 
by overlooking the evil we condemn, and advanc- 
ing the counteracting virtue by every means in our 
power. 

The philosophers who aimed at indifferentism, 
the saints who cultivated detachment, were not in- 
capable of partisanship. They had only chosen 
their course wisely and learned to see grandly. 
He can best dare to be a partisan who has once felt 
his essential identity with all life, so that if he 
strangles or cuts off he may realise that it is a 
part of himself he slays. And if he dare to be a 
non-partisan too, and flow in the great current of 
the universal process, he must do so not lazily or 
vaguely, but with the sage's hard-won philosophy 
or the saint's wise detachment. 

A hero of fiction, drawn in one of the most 
thoughtful and influential books of the last genera- 

144 



PATER'S HEROES 



tion, had as his personal motto: Tristem neminen 
fecit. It may at a glance seem not the loftiest 
ideal. Perhaps it would be a nobler one to make 
many glad, but it stands for more of renouncement, 
of restraint, of self-immolation, than at first ap- 
pears, — to move through the earth so gently, so 
cautiously, that no man may be the sadder for 
our presence. 

It was not a philosopher but the housemaid who, 
upon being reproached for a certain slothful method 
of work, responded, '' But all really good folks are 
a little lazy, aren't they?" xA.nd there was some- 
thing to consider in that suggestion. Even the 
housemaid noted a certain *' going softly'' of those 
who have come to realise that all life is sanctified ; 
a hesitancy in action, a considerateness in speech, 
a certain wistful attitude toward the spreading of 
effects once a thing is given concrete expression in 
the world. There are, indeed, in the indistinguish- 
able mass of people, folk who are born with a rarer 
insight ; the outcome, probably, of some great in- 
herited regret religiously nursed, and used as a 
warning and as a restraint upon all swift impulse ; 
there are folk who, as Hearn says, in one of his 
letters, "never did anything which was not— I will 
not say * right,' that is commonplace — ^any single 
thing which was not beautiful.'' These souls who 
lo 145 



THE HUMAN WAY 



add to the gentle grace and shining softness of 
life are often overlooked, and are only distantly 
related to the good folk who organise charities and 
have cast-iron creeds to believe in and live by; 
such gentle, slow-moving souls are not eager, zeal- 
ous or bustling; they often seem to have no par- 
ticular end in view, and certainly are not making 
full tilt toward it; but as they go they sprinkle a 
few flowers along the way. They lighten a few 
burdens; they shed a little grace upon life, which 
is not, it is true, bread or meat, but is sometimes 
as sadly needed as these. For the little flowers of 
life are, after all, vital matters. It is something, 
of course, to be able to gather together the neces- 
saries for living and to live; something, too, to win 
out, to be aggressive enough to succeed ; but though 
it is a quiet, hidden, shy thing that one must search 
in far corners to find, it is something, too, to go 
slowly and to note the fragile beauties by the way. 
A great many people cross the ocean every year, 
but comparatively few get up to see the sun spring 
up with a bound over the vast expanse of coloured 
water. Thousands of people motor through the 
cathedral towns of France in the summer, but only 
here and there is one who watches out the twilight 
in a lofty nave, sees darkness spread and engulf the 
vast enclosed space, and then hears the slow sham- 

146 



VELVET SOULS 



ble of the verger as he moves about setting a light 
to a candle here and there before a saint's image, 
until finally the spot becomes in very deed ''a dim, 
spacious, fragrant place afloat with lights/' Such 
things as these are left for the ''really good'' people 
that the housemaid had in mind, who move slowly 
over the earth, stepping softly upon the very 
ground beneath them with a care ''not to outrage 
its latent sensibilities." These are the people who 
understand most about suffering. They may not 
necessarily have gone through fiery furnaces them- 
selves, but they have the vivid imagination which 
knows what another's hurt means; their eyes are 
far-seeing, and they refuse to turn away from the 
realisation of the actual ignominy and accompany- 
ing pain which are a part of life. Such souls bake 
no bread, it may be honestly confessed, but they 
hold to high standards with a grip that is grim and 
unshakable, and they refine life. It is to them we 
look for the unvarying beauty in human nature 
which makes life worth while, even when its sordid 
and hideous aspects are so noisy and so near as to 
make the game seem hardly worth the candle. 

It was Pater's especial talent to depict over and 
over again this type of human being. Somewhere, 
passing slowly through the motley pageant of life, 
gentle-minded and silently observant of the gay 

147 



THE HUMAN WAY 



and moving throng, he places a velvet soul, soft to 
contact, whose very religion is not hurting, who 
withdraws and renounces, who looks for twilit 
spaces in life, and who adds his silence to the great 
and soothing silence which lies beyond the bustle 
of life. These are heroes who walk through the 
world sustained by an awe not painful, but yet 
restraining, *' generated by the habitual recogni- 
tion, beside every circumstance and event of life, 
of its celestial correspondent." 

Hearn was infinitely touched by just such velvet 
souls in Japan, since there are, by the nature of 
things, more of them there than in the West, 
where motion and haste are contagious. He writes 
of one: *'The sweetest little woman, not seemingly 
of flesh and blood, but of silk embroidery mixed 
with soul," who was dying slowly, in great poverty 
and much pain, but who never complained, never 
broke down, never ceased to smile, never allowed 
the thought of her personal sorrow to invade her 
surroundings. He writes of a man, too, who, dying, 
said to his wife, " Open the windows wide, that my 
friend may see the chrysanthemums in the garden." 

And, after all, the great thing to do for men in 
life is not to offer multiplied uses, but a rarer beau- 
ty. Modern civilisation, in its hurried scamper 
after comfort and material welfare, is over-apt to 

148 



THE RARE GIFT 



forget this. It is not Robert Fulton, who invented 
the steamboat, whom we look back upon with 
yearning gratitude, but the man who painted a 
picture or who left a song in the world; it is he 
who caught some strange or rare aspect of life, some 
shifting light, or delicate soimd, such as can be 
caught only by the still soul that waits and watches, 
and who gives them concrete form and prolonged 
existence ; it is he who calls us to quiet recollection 
whom we know for the heavenly messenger. 

A velvet soul in a family gives to life in that 
house a soft and shining texture, a still beauty 
without which family life means little more than 
combined interests. There was once a little girl 
who, from the time when she was first taken down 
among the big shops, was wont to make an effort to 
carry with her there a flower or flowers, and to leave 
them in the gloomiest or most crowded spot she 
entered. She was so little that it must have been 
almost unconsciously done, yet not only did it add 
to her own grace but it lent a new grace to the life 
about her. An old lady who died quite recently, 
an old lady who had nothing but herself and her 
gracious words to offer any one, had flowers sent 
to her through her last illness, not only by the 
housemaid who waited upon her, but by her dress- 
maker, and so one knew that she must have been, 

149 



THE HUMAN WAY 



denuded as she was of all material gifts, a velvet 
soul who lent soft lights and gentle shadings, grace 
and richness, to whatever life she crossed. Such 
souls do not leave a clear, hard mark when they 
pass, but they leave echoes, haunting memories, 
after- thoughts — and always gentle ones. 

One cannot imagine such souls without the oc- 
cupations that fit their gentle slowness. Nearly 
all such tend flowers, are given to digging and 
planting and watching the earth for the little 
shoots to thrust up their heads. They love music 
and children and innocence. They know sky 
colours and coloured forms ; they are not too busy 
to listen to bird-notes or watch the sparrows build. 
They may object to the regular Sunday services at 
church, but they haunt churches wherever they 
are, and whenever these are still and empty. And 
perhaps, when they pass on their way into the 
Great Beyond, thej^- shall have absorbed as much 
of life and have added as much to the life they 
leave behind them as the greatest railroad mag- 
nate, the busiest inventor, or most bustling captain 
of industry of them all. For life is not made rich 
as it increases in motion and speed and heaped-up 
concrete objects, but as it increases in depth of 
significance, in beauty, and in closeness of relation 
to the whole of the universe. 

150 



LIFE MORE ABUNDANT 



People who live long abroad always complain, 
when they come back to this country, that though 
we have the richest and most comfortable country 
in the world, life itself always seems meagre, made 
up of thin and gauzy and rather cheap materials. 
And the only possible reason is that more people 
in our land think of mean things, of wealth and 
advancement and material trappings, and pursue 
them with cruelty and inconsiderateness, and fewer 
people are left to pursue the things which outlast 
time, which are the looming reality behind little 
realities, beauty and truth and a pure intent. 
Where consciousness is centred on these things life 
takes on glow and colour and richness, apparently 
of its own accord. It becomes full without bustle, 
beautiful even when denuded, and, more vital still, 
it stretches out threads and feelers into the great 
cosmic pattern which has so little concern with 
riches and successes and is so deeply aware of 
beauty and truth. 

Lives such as these come into the world with the 
power to smooth the way, to soften contact, to 
disentangle confusion, to make human intercourse 
lovely. Their ties are many and they last without 
loosening. Moreover, the same insight which leads 
them to *'go softly'' is apt to dictate wisdom in 
the choice of companions. 

151 



THE HUMAN WAY 



There is a great deal in the Sutta-Nipata about 
the choosing of companions wisely: 

"If one acquires a clever companion, an associate 
righteous and wise, let him, overcoming all dangers, 
wander about with him glad and thoughtful. 

" If one does not acquire a clever companion, an asso- 
ciate righteous and wise, then as a king abandoning a 
conquered kingdom (natural desire?) let him wander 
alone like a rhinoceros. 

**Thus if I join myself with another'' (it continues 
naively), *' I shall swear or scold; considering this danger, 
let me wander alone like a rhinoceros." 

To carry with one through life the burden of 
many profound relations would require a very 
torrent of emotion, if we would not be broad at the 
expense of being shallow, and it doubtless would 
be an expenditure upon the many of what should 
belong to the few. Fidelity must not be a mere 
stubborn shutting of the eyes because we have 
submitted to the fate of man and lost, and a refusal 
to accept the new and different. It may verily 
be that when the half-gods go, the gods arrive. 
Life, by the nature of it, is a passing away, and 
that which belongs to us one day is gone the next, 
and only from the profounder depths of our being 
do we choose to hold that which has gone from us 
in the continuous life of the soul. 

152 



CHOICE OF RELATIONS 



But there is a familiarity, a comfort, a sweetness 
about that which has always been ours, always 
belonged to us, hard for the new and strange to 
usurp. It was this longing for the familiar which 
saddened and overwhelmed Lafcadio Heam so 
often in those last years in Japan, when he longed 
for some one who had always known and under- 
stood him. '' One's best friends have a certain far- 
ofifness about them," writes this brave but mutilated 
exile to his home, '' even when breaking their backs 
to please you. There's no such thing as clapping 
a man on the back and saying 'Hello, old boy!' 
There's no such thing as slapping a fellow on the 
knee or chucking a fellow under the rib. All such 
familiarities are terribly vulgar in Japan. So each 
one has to tickle his own soul and clap it on the 
back and say, 'Hello!' to it. And the soul, being 
Western, says : ' Do you expect me always to stay 
in this extraordinary country ? I want to go home, 
or get back to the West Indies at least. Hurry up 
and save some money.'" 

It is easy to understand this homesickness for 
familiarity, for letting loose the bonds and looking 
into another's sympathy and good-will and under- 
standing which, now and again, overcame that 
singular and isolated soul, cut off from humanity 
as he was, as much by his unassuageable thirst for 

153 



THE HUMAN WAY 



beauty and high truths as by his expatriation. But 
one need not travel to far Japan to know that sud- 
den, overwhelming homesickness, that longing to 
have some one clap us on the back who has known 
us from infancy. Whoever spends his maturity in 
an alien setting may find himself at any unex- 
pected moment suddenly facing his own homesick- 
ness in a strange world, where all men look at him 
through a veil of unfamiliarity. Life itself grows 
unfamiliar to us as we grow older. There is no 
more of the easy knitting-up of the affections once 
childhood is past. The very purpose of the life 
apart, the very weight of care and responsibility 
and separate interests, cut one off from the old 
relations, and it is difficult to clap any one on the 
back very heartily who has only known us since 
we have been old and tired. The close relation- 
ships must begin in youth, and a man should be 
careful lest the young, expansive years should 
escape him without those ties which mean life — for 
with age comes inevitably a certain shrinking from 
self-expression, a kind of shame at baring the self 
to another. It is a neoplatonic sense of reproach 
at our own embodiment and limitation, and we 
take refuge in impersonality in talk and expression. 
It has become sufficient to the grown soul to keep 
its secrets to itself in silence. Again, the very 

IS4 



FAMILIARITY 



sight of the glut of human existence has taught us 
that our only usefulness is in being strong to listen, 
pure of self-concern to offer aid, and calm to weigh 
judgment; in being one who, having lived in in- 
ward silence, has robbed the fire of heaven of some 
heat to warm the shivering souls who linger on the 
threshold. 

The genius, at any rate, is likely to offer his soul 
from time to time a little rest from reality ; to say 
to his soul: *'Let it all go. What is it worth ? Let 
life, if it be so persistent, flow on, but you step 
aside a little; fold your hands, cease grasping at 
floating straws, and stretch yourself, and take your 
ease just for an hour and dream of another and a 
better world. Dreams, after all, are the best of life.'' 
Is it not in these, indeed, that the old familiarities 
are fraught with sweetness and significance ? Who 
is truly grateful for good- will at the moment when 
it claps him ? No ; it is through a mist of memory, 
when all is said, that one knows the real values of 
life. He is a lucky fellow, too, even if he starve, 
who knows how, from time to time, to push open 
the door of dreams and walk through the scented 
moonlit gardens no hand has planted, where along 
the paths great tall flowers grow — flowers like white 
poppies, but sweet as the rose and the clove pink 
and the mignonette, diaphanous and swift to catch 

^55 



THE HUMAN WAY 



each sigh of the breeze and bend with it to the 
glistening grasses. There, too, all paths lead to a 
shimmering lake, silver-topped and bared to the 
moon, and the music in the garden is distant and 
half -hushed, but it never ceases; it sounds like a 
nightingale ready to die, or a violin so old that a 
full note would break it, or like the song a child 
makes who has known his first sorrow, and it hovers 
ever on the edge of that pain which is almost pleas- 
ure, and that pleasure which is wholly pain. 

After such a rest as that, one might indeed clap 
one's soul on the back again and say, ''Hello, old 
fellow ! Awake, and back again so soon, and eager to 
invent a new world of solid facts to rise up and hit 
you when you least expect it!" Well, freshness and 
vigour and the desire to fight and overcome must 
count for something, too, in the long adventure. 
But it will need all the familiarity, all the cordial 
cheer a man can muster, to wake out of the lotos- 
dream and go back into the heaven and hell of 
work and punishment and reward and disappoint- 
ment and separateness ; and he is luckiest who shall 
be greeted on the threshold of his new struggle by 
a smile once known and a clap on the shoulder and 
a voice much loved and long lost, saying, ''Hello, 
old boy!" 

There are other faiths to keep warm through life, 

156 



FAITH WITH THE DEAD 



faiths that beckon us still when all the old familiari- 
ties are dead. Who is willing to 

"Break faith with those whom he has laid 
In earth's dark chambers?" 

Perhaps only the most scrupulous, most exquisitely 
perceptive minds can thus keep the dead and the 
absent alive and with him, according them all the 
influence and participation in life that would be- 
long to the bodily presence, the living voice. But 
just because the cult of the absent makes the more 
difficult demand, its reward is the greater. There 
is a profounder peace, a more complete harmony, 
resultant from the loneliness braved and the diffi- 
culties overcome. We have the joy of a creative 
act in the thought that we have practically en- 
dowed with life one w^ho, but for our willing effort, 
would be lifeless; given a voice to one otherwise 
dumb. There is a great poetic reward in this cult 
of remembrance, and it is difficult not to believe 
that even the dead feel an increase of life in the 
ceremonies of remembrance given to them — how 
much more surely do they live when we allow the 
thought of them to underlie our every perception, 
our griefs and our joys, receiving the gifts of life 
not for ourselves alone, but in the spirit of the 
absent. 

157 



VI 

THE AREA OF THE PERSONALITY 

IN looking at successful and unsuccessful lives, 
what mainly impresses us is the fact that the 
successful life covers more ground. Its works last 
longer and effect more. The successful personality 
is the personality whose sympathies have spread 
wide and whose insight has guessed the hidden 
springs of blessed activities. The mind of wide 
area is not hemmed in too much by fear of space; 
it is not appalled or alienated by strangers and dis- 
tance, but carries with it a power of expansion wher- 
ever it goes. It even moves further and feels its 
way into the unplummetted depths of the unseen, 
and carries on in that mysterious realm the same 
barter of give and take that it extends around the 
world; it offers sympathetic recognition, and the 
powers of the unfathomable seem in turn to range 
themselves on its side. 

The first gift of such a nature is imagination, 
and imagination requires a soil from which the 

iS8 



EXPANSION 



weed of self has been torn up by the roots. The 
very beginning of the imaginative Hfe is a pushing 
away of the immediate. The demands of the per- ( 
sonal are exorbitant and narrowing, and the heart I 
must form the habit of wide and leisurely ranging 
before the bonds of the body are broken and the i 
soul can stretch itself. 

But this expansion does not mean escape from 
all sorrow. Sorrow is inseparable from life as we 
know it. But there are two kinds in the world: 
universal and personal sorrow. Few people ever at- 
tain to the first — grief for the w^orld as it is, for its 
inevitable contradictions, for the weary stretch of 
sin and mistakes ahead, for the antagonisms w^hich 
seem to be its form of life — so that the very signifi- 
cation of light is the absence of dark, and of good, 
is the subjugation of evil. But those w^ho learn 
such sorrow must first have laid themselves and 
their personal woes aside and have escaped their 
limitations; for to submit to them is to see the 
universe divided into sections and the world shut 
in by narrow walls. This is deplorable just because 
it is so little, so intense; because it mourns the 
frustration of such small desires, such scant losses, 
such meagre futilities. Do we cease to see the sun- 
light because our beloved is withdrawn, and is the 
glory of spring dimmed because our wishes are 

159 



THE HUMAN WAY 



thwarted? This is shutting the soul's eyes until 
they do not see beyond the personal fate. 

There is a very suggestive engraving of William 
Blake's, labelled: ''I Want." In it, upon a little 
bit of level land jutting into the sea, stands a 
speck of a man at the foot of a ladder. The ladder 
reaches up higher than the distant hills, beyond a 
crescent moon, and dwindles into a faint line among 
the stars. The man, with one foot on the lowest 
round, grasps the ladder with both hands and looks 
up, while two other specks of mortality, a man and 
a woman, with arms linked together and with 
backs turned to the ladder, seem to be wandering 
toward the rolling hills and peaceful vales of the 
background. The way of the ladder, though it 
end in the stars, looks wearisome, perilous, and 
lonely. There is no suggestion of companionship 
or of resting-place. The valleys with their running 
brooklets, the trees with their nesting birds, even 
the highest rocky hills, will soon be lost from sight, 
and there will be only the solitary monotonous 
climbing between two worlds. 

— The whimsical, petulant, noble-spirited and 
wholly delightful letters of Mr. Ruskin have been 
quite full of the sorrows of the man who props his 
desire against the stars. ''I am tormented,'' he 

/ writes, ''by what I cannot get said nor done. I 

1 60 



'M WANT'^ 



rw^ant to get all the Titians, Tintorets, Paul Ve- 
roneses, Turners, and Sir Joshuas in the world into 
one great, fire-proof, Gothic gallery of marble and 
serpentine. I want to get them all perfectly en- 
graved. I want to go and draw all the subjects 
of Turner's nineteen hundred sketches in Switzer- 
land and Italy, elaborated by myself. I want to 
get everybody a dinner who hasn't one. I want 
to macadamise some new roads to heaven with 
broken fools' heads; and I want to hang up some 
knaves out of the way — not that I've any dislike of 
them, but I think it would be wholesome for them 
and for other people, and that they would make 
good crows' meat. I want to play all day long and 
arrange my cabinet with new white wool. I want 
something to amuse me when I am tired. I want 
Turner's pictures not to fade. I want to be able 
to draw clouds and to understand how they go — 
and I can't make them stand still nor understand 
them — they all go sideways. Further, I want to 
make the Italians industrious, the Americans quiet, 
the Swiss romantic, the Roman Catholics rational, 
and the English Parliament honest — and I can't 
do anything and I don't understand why I was 
bom." 

We all more or less know the difficulty of allow- 
ing the Creator to fan the clouds His own way. 
II i6i 



THE HUMAN WAY 



We have all more or less vehemently questioned 
why we were bom, since, with all the will in the 
world to reform the universe, the most we can do 
is to order some household, to add to some little 
child's happiness, or amuse a neighbour. Barring 
the achievement of a half-dozen great reformers, 
a few poets, one or two discoverers, no man's work 
amounts to much. The mills of God grind slow; 
the machinery is enormous — too big for any hu- 
man eyes to see in its entirety; each man is but a 
peg or a screw in the right place. To live cheer- 
fully on the face of the planet requires many vir- 
tues, and insight enough to know one's place and 
accept it, not in the least in the spirit of Carlyle, 
who responded sardonically to Margaret Fuller's 
exuberant, ''I accept the universe," with, **Gad! 
she'd better!" but with Kipling's vim: 

"For to admire and for to see, 
For to be'old this world so wide!*' 

The fact is, mortals are put under a discipline of 
accomplishment through doing small things faith- 
fully. Ruskin did not elaborate Turner's nineteen 
hundred sketches, but by dint of patient and 
reiterated talking and writing about Turner, by 
pointing out and explaining his excellences, he 
taught masses of blind people to see what other- 

162 



LIFE'S LITTLE THINGS 



wise had been hid from them. No one man re- 
forms the prison system, but each man who takes 
it seriously to heart affects somebody else and pre- 
pares a soil into which a seed may some day drop. 
f-" The finest achievements are compact of patience, 
fidelity, tolerance, with some stray gleams of intel- 
ligence, insight, or genius. To cry for the Pleiades 
and listen to the clamour of undisciplined desires 
paralyses the will, and a more cheerful occupation 
is to be busy laying the blocks that are at hand. 
The great astronomer is not the man who sits on 
a hill with a telescope and yearns for the stars; 
he is concerned with minute and detailed calcula- 
tions on a slip of paper. Even Blake's little mortal 
will not be able to skip a rung of his ladder. He 
will have to keep his eyes fixed steadily one step 
ahead and no more, and move up round by round, 
or he will grow giddy and fall. He must gird his 
loins and take account of his losses and do the best 
he can with the material at hand. For to attempt 
to fling aside all the small things and aim only at 
the great brings us into strange contradictions of 
thought. 

''Which is better," wrote the lonely lady, who 
lived with her own thoughts in the '' Little-House- 
in-the-Woods,'' to me — ''which is better, the daily 
duty done or duty sacrificed for the career?" 

163 



THE HUMAN WAY 



For an instant, the question was so puzzling that 
1 turned instinctively to the dictionary, to find out 
what this great thing called '* career '' was, for which 
we were to sacrifice duty. Career, then, according 
to Nuttal, is ''the time of service, the race, the gen- 
eral course of action/' This helps one to see what 
the question means. A career is simply a series 
of duties faithfully done, and a wasted life is a 
life where duties are undone. People very often 
like to add an unreal glitter to a word, a sham 
polish which is not real gold, and then they become 
dazzled and confused. The word '* career " applies 
as justly to the housemaid as it does to Paderew- 
ski, and if one kind of work is perhaps a little les^ 
delightful, a little more arduous and exacting than 
the other, that may be the greater career because 
it calls out the greater moral qualities. 

"Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws 
Makes that and th' action fine,". 

warned the seventeenth-century poet, and we are 
still trying to absorb the simple truth that it is not / 
the thing we do but the way we do it that counts. / 
One comes slowly at any of the real meanings of 
life; but just as 

"All the springs are flashlights of one spring," 

164 



IN THE SAME BOX 



so all the duties are but samples of the great arche- 
typal Duty, and our question is not which duty 
falls to us, but how we meet the one that comes. 

It is by way of being the fashion nowadays to 
think that only noise is valuable; that a name 
bandied about in print and sounded in many 
mouths is noble. We are inclined to honour money 
first, and after that the power of becoming well- 
known. But if one dare whisper a secret aloud, 
they are rather vulgar qualities that make for 
these attainments, and rather vulgar rewards that 
are earned. If only one could honestly believe 
that, it would be so helpful! It is a higher stage 
of development, of course, that admires and yearns 
for real intellectual power, but even that is less to 
be desired than faithful service in whatever tasks v/e 
are called to do. 

There is one more aspect in the praise of life's 
little things. They are a great refuge. There 
come times to us all of sorrow and of shame and 
of awful questionings; times when we moan and 
weep and wring our hands and stare past the blind 
skies and wonder why we are tortured. And then 
soothing and quiet lie for us in life's little things, 
the small, immediate tasks. Let a man have the 
leisure or the shock that sets him for days together 
in the realm of the awful uncertainties, the great 

165 



THE HUMAN WAY 



questionings of whence and whither; let him live 
for a while conscious only that, 

"His speech is a burning fire, 
With his lips he travaileth; 
In his heart is a blind desire, 

In his eyes foreknowledge of death," 

and he will know how to value the refuge of life's 
small necessities, the little things that hem him 
in and reconcile him to the moment, the present 
day and its needs. 

And, indeed, when all is said and done, we are 
all of us in the same box — we are all in the same 
box, and the six sides of it are Death and Sorrow, 
Mutability and Decay, Search and Finality; and 
we are all of us jostling up against one another and 
getting in one another's way and hitting one another, 
or going off to the far corner and feeling lonesome 
and wishing some one would only take us for 
granted and like us, or remember us and give us 
a holiday — and, perhaps, too, perhaps, there are 
outlets to the box; we do not know surely, but 
since none can positively deny us, we can still hope 
there are outlets to the big box of mortality we 
call life, and the names may be Hope and Courage, 
Patience and Trust, Love and Wisdom. And when 
we pursue these without let and without faintness 

i66 



THE GREAT CAREER 



of heart, we are in very deed making our career, 
running the race, accepting the given course of 
action, and fulfilling the time of service. 

For there are no answers to the questions whence 
we came, and whither in all eternity we are bound, 
or why we ever found ourselves here, but as we 
stand at this very instant there are little turnings 
for better and for worse, and the better is in- 
variably the duty done, and the worse is always 
the turning aside from the given task and choosing 
a glittering, false ideal which we name ''career/' 

One of the great difficulties of life is that we are 
so apt to see our present moment in a false light, 
unless love or religion or the wisdom of piety some- 
how shed a true light on it. Let any man reflect 
upon the emotion with which he met a given 
moment, and the emotion with which he reflected 
upon it ten or twenty years later. How often the 
suffering, the loneliness — aye, the awful tragedy 
itself — ^were but the way of the deepening conscious- 
ness, the path of learning; while the gaiety, the 
merriment, the gratified desire, will prove the 
futile, wasted time, or at best the season of mere 
vegetation. If only we could pluck the fruits of 
experience and taste them at the right moment, 
with what a bold face and high courage we might 
face our fate! For it is not what happens to us, 

167 



THE HUMAN WAY 



after all, that matters; it is the thoughts with 
which we decorate what happens. Suffering, even 
I the seemingly un vital and unmeaning suffering of 
sheer dulness and loneliness, is often in retrospect 
the most beautiful and most worthy of our ex- 
periences. Those moments in which we stoically 
bore our pain and dejectedly but determinedly ful- 
filled our daily tasks, those were the moments that 
were worth while, when fulness of being, which is 
the meaning of life, was added unto us. When 
one can, it is well to stop and realise that this 
world of shows about us is but the sister-world 
of truth, where, as in a mirror darkly, we see the 
shadows of reality pass. 

Therefore, the questionings of the lonely lady 
in the '*Little-House-in-the- Woods'' are but the 
type of the questions we are all daily setting our- 
selves, and the answer is that it is not the butter, 
but the recurrent duty of churning it, that is the 
eternal reality; for, as we all know too well, our 
products belong to a fleeting world, and it is only 
by continuous recreating that we keep this physical 
world in existence at all ; but the fidelity, the truth, 
the honour of our minds as we work, these belong to 
the eternal verities. 

And for the sake of the lonely and the somewhat 
bored and sad people who dream that a closer touch 

x68 



CHOICE 



with activities and so-called life and thought would 
solve their problem, let it be said that what the 
world needs more than anything else to-day, when 
communication is so easy and so diverting, where 
so many people are swept away by the mere cur- 
rent of general opinion, are those lonely people 
who have little outside to divert them, and who 
are, therefore, looking into themselves and listening 
to the eternal truths voiced there. ''Who listens 
to the Eternal Voice is delivered from many an 
opinion,'' wrote that sage of the spiritual life long 
ago, who himself chose loneliness and austerity, 
and made out of it a book to console and uplift 
the ages. 

But to choose duty, even that near at hand, is 
still choice, and choosing, choosing constantly and 
day by day, is the enlargement of character. One 
of the most interesting Raphaels in the National 
Gallery is a tiny drawing of The Knight's Vision, 
Hardly larger than a sheet of foolscap paper, it has 
many of the qualities, in all their pristine loveli- 
ness and radiancy, that we have learned to look 
for in the earlier and finer Raphaels. On the 
ground lies the knight asleep ; near him stand two 
women, the one offering a flower, the other a book, 
while in the background one sees an adorable lit- 
tle Italian landscape, such as is half the charm 

169 



THE HUMAN WAY 



of the old pictures. The flower or the book, the 
primrose path of dalliance or stem wisdom, the 
tale of this choice runs through all our history. 
Of Herakles the same tale is told. Meditating in 
a solitary place, alone, what use to put his mar- 
vellous strength to, two women appear to him — 
Vice and Virtue, each representing the advantages 
to be gained by choosing herself. It is over easy 
to forget how completely life is at all points a mat- 
ter of choice, a daily — nay, an hourly — ^renewing of 
choice. Which shall it be — a definitely directed will 
or an easy drifting with the current? We decide 
it when we open our eyes on the daylight every 
morning. Life undirected, life that is not held 
taut to an ideal, an object ever a bit beyond the 
grasp, is the life that becomes a bore, that slackens 
hold on all things and drops wearily into whatever 
channel is near and runs its course to the end. 

Bume-Jones resented somewhat Carlyle's preach- 
ing about doing the duty nearest at hand, because 
it seemed to limit the field of choice. It is not 
necessarily virtue to do the nearest duty; it is the 
behest of virtue, after all, that a man choose the 
highest duty conceivable for himself, and then, 
having chosen, that he pursue it to the end as a 
lover his mistress or as a hawk its prey. For life 
is, in its essence, choice. If a man be unwise 

170 



THE HIGHEST DUTY 



enough to choose the path of daUiance, so much 
the worse for him. If a man be timid enough to 
choose mere conformity, he may thereby escape 
much pain, but he likewise debars himself from all 
the highest joys, the more bounding exaltations. 
''Take your own way and never change it,'' 
Bume- Jones writes to his boy Philip at school. 
*'Only that way will you win, either now or after- 
ward, in life. It will always be so, dear; there will 
always be people telling you how to think and act 
and dress, and what you are to say and how you 
are to live, down to the tiniest trifle, meaning that 
you are to think and act and dress as they do, and 
some sort of penalty you are to pay for differing 
from them — get away from it, body and mind/' 
he advises the boy. It was good advice and can- 
not be too often repeated. Choose what you want ; l 
look at life curiously, for it is a marvellously rich 
fairyland of desirable things; look long and rev- 
erently and choose what thing, of all the things to 
be had upon earth, you will have for your own, 
and, having chosen, pursue it, for it is this pursuit 
of the worthy object that strengthens the sinews 
and keeps the heart's pulses high and the zest of 
living keen. Burne- Jones had himself made a diffi- 
cult choice. He had been educated to take orders, 
and when the time came a new and a different 

171 



THE HUMAN WAY 



vision of beauty had usurped his heart, a service 
to man through multiplying the visible, lovely 
forms of earth, and the pain of the moral and 
mental struggle was intense for a year or two; 
but, once the choice made, he never regretted it. 
It was a real choice. Once he entered into his 
profession, he moved steadily on toward the goal, 
never wearying of work. He never understood the 
restless people who wanted a change, and who 
wanted to get away from their work. ''I'd like to 
stay right here in this house,'' he said, ''for num- 
berless years." The getting on with one's work 
was enough happiness, and beyond him lay ever 
more and more visions of loveliness to be embodied. 
With mere conformity for comfort's sake he had no 
patience, and his advice to his boy was ever that 
he should make his choice and yield to no per- 
suasions of others. Of these, the persuasions and 
solicitations of others to do and to be as they are, 
he writes again: "Think as little of that side of 
life as you can — at the worst, it is like the teasing 
of flies on a summer's day — and there is left to 
think of sun and moon and seasons and earth and 
seas and monuments and images, and the lives of 
the great; all these may be your life if you will." 
That is a very lovely list pf things to make a per- 
sonality with — sun and moon and seasons and 

172 



THE FOOL'S LAUGHTER 



earth and seas and monuments and images and 
the Hves of the great; and the choice whether one 
will fill the flying moments with these or with dust 
and disorder and gossip and petty interest in mean- 
nesses and bonnets and little conformities is a liv- 
ing and recurrent issue. Does it matter that if 
one choose the larger way the fools must laugh? 
There is an old Welsh triad of the laugh of fools. 
It says: ''The fool laughs at a thing because it is 
good ; he laughs at a thing because it is bad ; and 
he laughs at a thing because he cannot understand 
it." The fool always laughs at a great man because 
he sees only the discomforts and deprivations of 
the great man's choice, and he knows nothing of 
the exaltations and great joys of pursuit and the 
hopes of service. 

Moreover, choice is formative and upbuilding. 
Success is as often as not weakening and discom- 
posing. Failure, so long as the soul never gives 
in, but uses each incompleteness as the base of a 
new start and a higher effort, does not hurt; but 
an ignoble choice, a slight standard, leave their 
mark upon the soul for all life. Life is the upward 
struggle, not attainment, but stepping forward, lit- 
tle by little. "Hitch your wagon to a star," for 
who hitches to an ox will not get far out of the 
highway, and, 

173 



THE HUMAN WAY 



/ 



"Whichever way the highways tend, 
Be sure there's nothing at the end.'* 

There is more experience and knowledge to be 
gotten out of a smash-up with a star than in all the 
jog - trotting along the main - travelled roads of a 
whole life. On the whole, courage is the first and 
last virtue; courage to attempt, to endure rebuff, 
to begin again and again. 

Not only the one great choice what one shall do 
with a life and make of the little soul encased in 
one's flesh counts ; but the days, one after another, 

"Muffled and dumb, like barefoot dervishes," 

come offering us new choices, spreading before us 
*' diadems and fagots, bread, kingdoms, stars, and 
sky that holds them all,'* and daily we choose 
among them that which best fits the desire of the 
soul. 

But, above all, we must choose work. No per- 
sonality is built on idle drifting. "Thou, O God, 
dost sell us all good things at the price of labour,'' 
jotted down that tremendous worker Leonardo in 
his note-book. Himself a writer, a philosopher, a 
sculptor, an engineer, an inventor, and a great 
painter, he might well know the worth of his own 
saying, for even to genius rewards come as the 

174 



THE PRICE WE PAY 



response to work. Indeed, genius is likely to be 
a large capacity for drudgery and a great enjoy- 
ment of process. A lady fluttered up to an eminent 
violinist after his performance and said, ** I would 
give half my life to be able to do that." 

"That, madam,'' he replied, *'is exactly what / 
have given to do it." 

There is no doubt that we pay for all we get in 
life, but a great many of us drift in a half-hearted, 
unthinking way to getting and paying only when 
we must, and then unwillingly. It would be vastly 
more advantageous to think out our problem be- 
forehand, to decide what things we really must 
have in life, and just what we are willing to give 
for them: how much effort, how much drudgery, 
how much renouncement. Of course the incurably 
childish mind will cling to a wavering doubt that 
it may somehow eat its cake and have it too — ^get 
the rewards of labour and escape making the pay- 
ments ; but most of us who believe in any law of 
cause and result will sooner or later settle to some 
sort of rough calculation as to what we want to pay, 
and pare our ptirchases accordingly. But if we 
do not, we also pay for making no decision, and 
few things, in the end, come higher than drifting 
through life trusting somehow that bills will never 
come due. We pay for drifting and we pay for 

175 



THE HUMAN WAY 



living; we pay for liberty, for unconventionality ; 
we pay a pretty price for conventionality and uni- 
formity; we pay for our habits and we pay for 
having none ; we pay for joy and we pay for grief ; we 
pay for our doubts and we pay higher for our faiths. 
The truth is, life and its fruits are not presented 
to us now, a free gift, as they were to Adam, but 
living and all its prizes are dangled before us, a 
little out of reach, while the Sibylline voice sounds 
out from the darkness beyond, saying: ''Here, my 
little man; here is life, and here all the fruits of 
life. Come, find out the prices and buy.'' And 
it is quite useless to try to snatch and run. The 
attempt never succeeds. We are always caught 
and the worth of the goods gotten from us, and a 
heavy interest extorted, too, as a punishment for 
trying to escape. A great deal of modern educa- 
tion is an attempt to snatch the goods without 
paying the price, and the results are sadly defeated. 
It is just as well to let a child know ever so early 
in life that it costs a good deal of effort and a 
patient renewal of effort day after day to win the 
great delights of reading. It costs, for example, 
not a little to be ordinarily well educated ; it costs 
infinitely more to become an accomplished hu- 
manist; it costs in effort and in renunciations to 
be a specialist. 

176 



THE COST OF INDIVIDUALITY 

We pay for our conventionality and confomiity 
by a good deal of self -suppression and by becoming 
so painfully like sheep in appearance and intellect ; 
and if we elect the opposite course and decide to 
develop individuality regardless of costs, we pay 
often in loss of friends and approval; we accept 
a good deal of misunderstanding and ill-will, and 
sometimes rudeness, and the heavy responsibility 
of finally producing and making good the individ- 
uality bought at so noticeable a cost. The latter 
is the more expensive article, undoubtedly, and if 
we have chosen to buy it we must somehow scrape 
together the purchase money. The eighteenth 
century in English literature, for example, took 
propriety and conformity to its gods; it paid a 
small price, as was right, for so slim an experience 
of life. The nineteenth century broke away, de- 
manded fulness of being and of knowledge and 
heightened significance, and it paid, in great de- 
structions, doubts, uncertainties, anguish, mental 
and spiritual darkness, for the fuller flood of 
light that was to follow. How boldly, how un- 
dauntedly they accepted the bleakest of pes- 
simisms rather than juggle with their facts! How 
they sang: 

"L'rnfinita vanita del tutto/' 

177 



THE HUMAN WAY 



and emphasised, 

"The flower that smiles to-day 
To-morrow dies/' 

How they pointed out the nothingness and futility 
of mankind, so that any one seeing his ego in its 
real nakedness would turn and run, and each one 
even to bear his own existence **must bedeck him- 
self with the rags of a stage costume and hold the 
masks of joy and love before his face in order to 
add to the interest of his appearance/' This was 
a heavy price to pay for the more truthful and 
rational sense of life's values that grew thence. 
But who would say the results shamed the suffer- 
ing ? It were a cowardly thing indeed to buy great 
treasures and then weep and lament over the money 
we had spent. 

We pay for our affections; we pay in the 
selfish, perhaps, but instinctive desire to win love 
where we love; we pay in fear of loss; we pay 
in the increase of our sufferings by all those of 
others whom we love as ourselves, and whose 
sufferings we therefore realise as we do our own. 
We pay; but, after all, ''passion, like wisdom, is 
justified of all her children." None who have 
known them would be willing to forego the affec- 
tions for a self-centred immunity and security. 

178 



FREEDOM OF SPEECH 



It is likewise a costly matter to indulge in free- 
dom of speech. Utterance always brings momen- 
tary relief. Indeed, young and enthusiastic peo- 
ple find it almost impossible to exist without an 
occasional unloading of the mind and heart. But 
to say what you want to say just when and as you 
want to say it, is a right for which you often pay 
too dear. It is a costly privilege and the benefits 
derived are apt to dwindle in value as the hours 
pass and the burning moment wanes. We pay 
for all our little indiscretions and impulsive, im- 
patient moments. Leonardo again says: ** Pa- 
tience serves against insult as clothes do against 
cold, since, if you multiply your clothes, cold can- 
not hurt you. Similarly, let thy patience increase 
under great offences and they will not be able to 
hurt your feelings.'' Indeed, it is a point to lay 
to heart that the greatest freedom is self-restraint. 

We pay for our doubts with much darkness and 
uncertainty; we pay for our faiths with infinite 
courage and trust, often in the teeth of calamity 
and the face of destruction. We pay for our high 
ideals with great loneliness. We pay for life itself 
in much effort to sustain it, in greater effort to 
train it into worthy channels, in unremitting effort 
to keep it there. We pay for our inevitable sorrows 
and losses and errors sometimes with anger and 

179 



THE HUMAN WAY 



denunciation, sometimes with feeble complaining 
and prostration, sometimes with endurance and 
stoic quiet, or best with tender and hopeful resigna- 
tion; but whatever coin we give, we know at least 
that nothing is got for nothing. A complete and 
resigned outlook upon life is a purchase which 
must necessarily cost a round sum; a long and 
careful training, even perhaps a long line of godly 
ancestors. 

Who choose the great ideals and the high emo- 
tions must be ready with payment of the more 
poignant agonies and greater dangers. But the 
great point is to know what we want to buy, and, 
secondly, whether or not we are willing to pay 
the price. 

There are people who have chosen a role or 
accepted a temperament, and who are determined 
to abide by its limitations, but they do not escape 
their debt. 

There is a charming little tale of Ruth McEnery 
Stuart's about an old darky who was *' marked for 
rest,'' and who met the whole of life seated in a 
comfortable rocking-chair, while his wife, awed by 
this deliberate expression of the will of Destiny, 
cheerfully supported him and his six children. 
This cult of being ''marked for" the line of least 
resistance has had a period of excessive power and 

i8o 



THE PUSH OF THE UNIVERSE 

eclat since the laws of heredity have been popu- 
larised and given to the masses, and the gift has 
proved a delightful one for those desiring above 
all accomplishments and all achievements to take 
rest in this life. To say a quality has been inherited 
has been almost as conclusive to the half-educated 
as to say a man, bound hand and foot, cannot 
move. But qualities are no more inherited than 
are accomplishments. Tendencies are inherited, 
and even these are no more necessarily bound to 
become habits than environment is bound to be 
conformed to. A son does not always follow the 
ancestral vocation, or practise the ancestral vir- 
tues, and if these are not binding, surely the an- 
cestral vices are no more so. Ibsen's Ghosts has 
frequently been taken as a thesis proving that 
heredity is not to be circumvented, whereas Ghosts 
is a tract on telling the truth and not on heredity 
at all. Ibsen was bent on having people face facts 
and act according to their true nature, and he spent 
his energies showing that wherever we idealise facts 
away, we meet disaster. The tragedy of Ghosts lay 
not in the fact that Osw^ald's heredity w^as fatal, 
but that his mother's lies had prevented his re- 
viewing the facts and applying remedies. Here we 
come to the greatest fact to be taken into account 
in the whole m^atter of accepting hereditary tem- 

i8i 



THE HUMAN WAY 



perament: if life is full of poisons, so also is it full 
of antidotes. The world-will is indeed without us, 
but it is also within. The universe pushes against 
us, and, in the end, will surely overthrow our bodies 
and we shall lay them down to make some spot of 
earth greener and more fertile, but so long as the 
life-breath is in us, the world-will is within as well 
as without. So long as we breathe we can react 
against the push of the universe. To be sure, men 
react in different degrees, and the genius pushes 
back against the universe harder than the jelly- 
fish, but the point is, that so long as a creature is 
alive he can react. He is never necessarily a slave 
to any inheritance or any environment. If we pin 
our faith to fate we have as much right to believe 
in fatal courage as in fatal cowardice, in fatal power 
of mind to conquer stuffs less living and less alert, 
in fatal victory of wisdom over destiny. 

But to attain the better fatalities, the personality 
must be unified, must consciously face and come to 
know the facts outside itself, must wilfully react 
upon them. The first manifestation of weakness 
is the scattered, disintegrated personality, the mind 
not quite sure of itself or of what it wants. Anger, 
grief, passion, appetite, caprice, rage disintegrate, 
and leave their victim powerless. In Blake's Mad 
Song a supreme touch of genius lies in the lines: 

182 



THOUGHTS CREATE 



"Like a fiend in a cloud 
After night I do crowd,'' 

And not the exigencies of rhyme brought in that 
word crowd, but the sudden vision of a personality 
broken, scattered, a prey to lawless, multitudinous 
instincts. 

So when we ask, How shall a man escape his an- 
cestry ? the answer comes : By building up a well 
unified character, by establishing a personality, 
controlled and well leashed in by a dominating 
faculty, and by training the mind to face facts 
squarely and honestly, and to call them by their 
right names. If we were to delude ourselves into 
believing that the world-will were not outside us 
as well as within, we might swiftly fall, but if it 
is outside as well as within, the remedy is to stand 
up, gird our loins, and push. 

The first power we have to deal with is that of 
thoughts. Our thoughts have to be directed 
against obstacles, and thoughts are not hereditary, 
though a tendency toward a certain form of think- 
ing may be. Our thoughts, in the main, are such 
as we make shift to gather together, to evolve out 
of our experiences, our failures and successes; 
our thoughts adapt themselves to whirling cir- 
cumstance, and, except in the deadest of cases, 

183 



THE HUMAN WAY 



the son does not think what the father thought. 
By obeying our thoughts, we try their power, we 
measure their force against the encroaching forces 
of the world, ''The event/' said a philosopher, 
'4s the actualisation of thought. '* Think any one 
thought often enough and then see how it comes 
true. It was Goethe who said, with a certain 
weariness, ''What we wish for in youth heaps it- 
self over us in age''; and Emerson, "All prayers 
come true; therefore be very careful what you 
pray for." Willing comes true, wishes beget facts, 
and thoughts create visible objects. 

To train a child, therefore, to think and to will, 
is to train him to take his inheritance into his 
hands and bend it into such shape as he wants. 
The beginning of illumination is analysis. To 
teach one person to look at facts and call them by 
the right names is the best of education and pre- 
pares him to cope with destiny. It must have 
been Emerson, believing as he did in a wind of 
destiny which blew ever toward the necessary and 
the right, who suggested that if we could but 
throw in our desires to run the same course with 
the stars in their orbits, we could harness these 
heavenly forces to our purposes. But go in a cross 
current and you run the risk of being crushed every 
minute, The way of the stars, according to that, 

184 



CROWNED WITH THE STARS 

would be the way of right and necessity, but the 
danger would come in any man's fancying that the 
wishes and opinions of the masses were the forces 
of the universe. The masses are the units waiting 
a leader to unify them, and the opinion of the 
majority is, by the very nature of it, wrong. That 
opinion is wrong which in the presence of a pos- 
sible higher accepts the lower view, and whatever 
view is popularised till it meets the understanding 
of the great majority is necessarily on a low level. 
It was something quite different that Emerson 
meant when he suggested that we harness the stars 
to pull our purposes. Doubtless he meant just 
what Traherne meant when he wrote in his medi- 
tations: *'You will never enjoy the world aright 
till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are 
clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars. ' ' 
Such enjoyment as this it was that gave Whit- 
man his strength, that left Blake, after a life of 
hardship, labour, mischance, abuse and ill success, 
singing upon his death-bed, so full was he of serenity 
and peace and sense of good work done, — so that he 
literally sang himself from the bed of earthly fail- 
ure into the arms of death. '' But I know he was 
cheered at the throne," as the poet did not say, 
but should have said. This is to conquer destiny 
by wilfully identifying one's self with all the vie- 

i8s 



THE HUMAN WAY 



torious, healing processes of life, and who does this 
is the victor. 

And those who are doomed to suffer bodily ills 
and incapacities have but a wider field to traverse, 
a more numerous enemy to overcome, a bigger 
victory to record. They at least can always suffer 
to good purpose, can always build up a sublime 
thought, or a fine disposition, or an unlimited 
sympathy out of what, at first glance, might seem 
a disadvantage. 

''The more trouble, the more lion; that's my 
principle,'' said Emerson's washerwoman to him; 
and as one walks about looking into the faces of 
one's fellow-citizens, one wonders if it is not, after 
all, the thought of facing trouble that has drawn 
the most decisive lines in their faces. It seems a 
pity that we should waste good life so instead of 
enjoying the enjoyable things, like breathing and 
looking round and liking one's fellows. One ques- 
tions whether this conviction of the hostility of 
life is well grounded, and whether the attitude of 
worry, of preparing for the worst, is really neces- 
sary. If one could only accept the reverses as a 
sort of poison — kerosene emulsion or Bordeaux 
mixture — administered to the plant to destroy 
the devouring worm and make the blossoms more 
perfect, one would perhaps meet them with less 

i86 



DROPPING BURDENS 



wearing anxiety and in a more pliant attitude. 
Life is too beautiful and, so far as we are assured, 
too rare an occurrence to spend it all, tensely- 
drawn up, facing our sorrows and our deprivations. 
And as Epictetus said, ''It is a shame for the soul 
to give out before the body.'' 

Great men, the saints and the geniuses, somehow 
always escape worry. They fling the private bur- 
dens on the shoulders of Destiny with an inward 
conviction of Destiny's ultimately beneficent in- 
tents; and perhaps, too, they are bom realising 
how small a dot a life is in a soul's career. One 
thing is certain, that the great interests and the 
nobler pursuits are the surest relief from fretting 
care and nerve-racking anxieties. 

After all, such is our impuissance in all the 
major matters of life that the very beginning of 
wisdom is the flinging aside of the burden and 
living the moment through for what it is worth 
in itself, leaving the future to a more capable hand. 
Planning occasionally helps us to seize an oppor- 
tunity, but worrying never does anything but eat 
up vitality and power. Some training in faith is 
required to take to-morrow's dinner on trust, and 
yet how slight a turn in the screw can change a 
destiny, and how little our own hand has to do 
with the turning. 

187 



THE HUMAN WAY 



A depressed and industrious gardener, grubbing 
for a bed of killing worms among some clove-pink 
roots, was startled by a low voice close to his 
elbow: ''Any work I can get to do?'* And out of 
his depression and faint-heartedness, from a con- 
sciousness where there seemed to be no work for 
anybody to do or room in the world for any one 
to live, he answered, harshly: ''No, nothing at 
all/' Glancing up, he saw a strange, muscular 
twitch around the mouth of the beggar who turned 
off; and, noting it, he became aware of a tattered, 
sickly boy, with the look of endurance at last ebb, 
and the helpless child-nature near to the birth 
again. So the gardener jumped up and called the 
boy back, and listened again to the old story of 
works unexpectedly shut down in a distant manu- 
facturing town, of a week's tramp accompanied by 
every possible deprivation — a mission cot free for 
three nights while a job was hunted, the time up 
and neither job nor money forthcoming. "When 
did you eat last?'' the gardener asked, staring. 
"Day before yesterday." And self-pity won the 
day, and the mouth twitched again, and tears 
made muddy tracks down the boy's brown cheeks. 
The gardener had his own worries, not matters of 
dinners, exactly, but things as vital; and as he 
sat, later, watching the friendless creature, clean 

j88 



THE AFFECTIONS 



and clothed and rested, fed and encouraged, it 
suddenly came over him that the whole change 
wrought in the face of the lad's universe came not 
from his powers of persuasion, nor yet his abilities, 
nor the gardener's sympathies and good intentions, 
but merely from an uncontrolled muscle round the 
boy's mouth — a muscle that twitched when he 
could no longer speak. 

Perhaps, with our destiny ever dangling on so 
fine a thread, there is something in letting life take 
care of itself at times, living out the moment for 
all it is worth, doing our best at the immediate 
juncture, and flinging the burden of the distant 
to-morrows upon more capable shoulders. 

''What, my pretty fellow! So comfortable? 
So assured? So near asleep?" Fate would seem 
to say before he takes the most pointed dagger to 
''stab our spirits broad awake." 

But he would be a temerarious thinker who 
would deny the uses of adversity, and a dullard 
w^ho could not see that the spirit grows most swiftly 
when the blows of fate fall fastest. 

And in every life when one falls, as each one must 
who makes a glorious ending, into that miry slough 
whither the scum and filth of limitation perpetu- 
ally pour, it is well to remember that the pil- 
grimage is long and varied, and that Help has 

189 



THE HUMAN WAY 



a way of wandering on the edges of just such 
bogs. 

Sorrow and anxiety, work and determined ac- 
tion, patience and courage with the small daily 
tasks, all these help to stretch the personality, but 
above all the personality stretches as far as its 
affections. A man is all that he truly perceives 
and loves, and possession is no true test of absorp- 
tion. This is the meaning of the old mystic saying: 
''We are as holy as we will to be holy.'* For if a 
man loves holiness, even though he never attains 
to the actual practice of it, he does at least identify 
his deeper self with the cause of holiness. When 
it comes to the issue, his real self will be on that 
side and if he contradict its mandates he must wage 
continuous internecine warfare until the stronger 
element in him gain the victory. For we identify 
ourselves in the end with what we love. 

When we realise the meanness and wretchedness 
of small, persistent desires, the desire of fame, of 
health, of strength, of adulation, or, meanest of 
all, the desire of riches and of power, we begin to 
be able to lay them aside. Once the feverish 
futility of trying to make our small bodily wants 
prevail, has shown itself to us in all its stupidity, 
we begin to look for medicine for the bare, stripped 
soul. Then Nature steps in and consoles us. 

190 



THE GREAT GIFT 



**See!" she says, *'how small it all was! Lift up 
your eyes and look beyond!'' And one sees the 
everlasting hills in their quiet strength and the 
wonderful inverted bowl above, spilling blue at- 
mosphere over us, and continually shifting its 
wondrous scenery, and we see the sluggish pools 
mirroring the heavens, and the moving bodies 
near it, and we hear the rivers and brooks gallop- 
ing seaward and the unending swish and surge of 
the ocean. They all call to us and claim us. We 
are even as they are; we, too, change with the 
changing phases of the moon; we, too, ceaselessly 
moan with the sea ; we are deathlessly aspiring like 
the hills, and with this feeling of identification with 
all creation comes the presentiment of peace. 

It is less hard to be at ease with nature than to 
be at ease with man, but after all he falls short of 
his full stature who does not ultimately see him- 
self in every man and every man in himself. We 
are so little different — all of us! A few externals 
torn away and we face each other in a mirror ; the 
self -same hungry, pleading, grasping atoms, yearn- 
ing for fuller being and for more adornments, 
spasmodically seizing them, weeping at disappoint- 
ments, beating down and destroying obstacles and 
very weary and somewhat disillusioned when vic- 
tory rewards us ; all so alike and all in such piteous 

191 



THE HUMAN WAY 



plight ! It would seem that universal benevolence 
would be the natural result of our first insight, but 
it is not without effort that we approach man. 
The soul is clothed on with many garments of time 
and of manner wherewith to hide its real worth. 
Often we ourselves hardly know what we have to 
offer others. Sometimes we think the things we 
have are all there is to give, but the gift of the 
quality of ourselves, or noble expression of the in- 
ward intent, are the real gifts of value. In a much- 
read recent novel there is a hero who by mere 
wilful assumption of cynicism alienates his wife 
and cripples her life. It is the sin of thinking con- 
ciete things are the only true values upon earth. 
Generous deeds he recognised, but the words which 
should frame them he would have no dealings with. 
In the gospels Christ's chief services were noble 
words and divine visions. But to establish noble 
relations with others presupposes a deep intimacy 
with ourselves. We must know what we have to 
present, and a false estimate of ourselves, our 
motives, our powers is fatal to friendship or even 
to the lesser human relations. The beauty of our 
relations rests upon sincerity, and we can only be 
sincere with others when we have been profoundly 
sincere with ourselves. This requires much re- 
flection and a keen measuring of ourselves, our 

192 



THE ESCAPE 



downfalls and our achievements. Only in this 
way do we meet men fairly and helpfully. The 
area of the soul expands with every new man or 
clan or race we can so meet. 

Expansion comes, too, from courage in under- 
taking. Who fears the long task and trembles lest 
concentration and purpose falter ere he come to 
an end, narrows his scope. A prolonged service, a 
steady discipline stretching through years of regu- 
lar accretion, this gives fulness and continuity to 
the broken life. It is the tendency of life to offer 
itself in scraps and fragments until, looking back, 
w^e have only such points of identity as name and 
kindred and habitation. But a life aiming ever 
at absorbing all experience gains a new strength 
of personality, a new sense of power over time. 

All life is the chance to enlarge the self — to es- 
cape the hours of mere broken repetition of tasks 
and meaningless diversions— a chance to fling out 
our shuttle into the open, weaving a pattern beyond 

space and time. 
13 



VII 

THE HIDDEN LIFE 

UPON the secret life depends the growth and 
development of personality. The complexity, 
the fulness of modern life, the difficulty of adjust- 
ing one's self to increasingly exorbitant external de- 
mands are wearing out many a spirit, and the in- 
ward life is dissipated in the outer struggle. These 
are breaking the spirit and leaving stragglers on 
the march, whose courage has failed, and whose 
part in the general movement has become a drag 
instead of an impulsion. Such are those whose 
nervous systems are in continuous conflict with the 
scheme of the universe ; the firmness and ruthless- 
ness of the establishment of the universe inevit- 
ably and constantly pushes them to the wall. The 
result is the great army of the vanquished ; people 
hopelessly a prey to melancholy, to hysteria, to 
depression and drugs. 

The nice adjustment of spirit and body, the 
training of the spirit to take charge of the body, 

194 



THE PERSONALITY AND THE UNIVERSE 

and the training of the body to obey the behests 
of the spirit, are difficult but not insuperable mat- 
ters. It is no wonder that in the multiplicity of 
objects and ideas many individuals should stumble ; 
rather it is a wonder that so many find an anchor 
and remain steadfast to some ideal of truth and 
self-sacrifice and fair intent. 

There are many efforts made now to gather to- 
gether these invalids with body and spirit at odds, 
prey to diseases of the will and the personality, 
and by encouragement and kindly suggestions, by 
brave thoughts and healthful words, by repeated 
infusions of wisdom to renew their relations to life 
and effort, and to lead them from the bonds of 
self. For '' Happiness," an old German writer said, 
*'has no private business to transact." Indeed, 
hard as it is to realise, happiness and health come 
in those moments when most we are rid of our- 
selves. Whether in the disinterested love of an 
art, whether in a faith, or in work of human ser- 
vice, it is when w^e consecrate our energies to some- 
thing beyond ourselves, and grow to feel as well as 
to say that our little personal success or failure 
does not matter, that we are on the road that leads 
to happiness. This is a hard lesson to teach even 
normal man, but to teach it to the abnormal man 
who has thrown up his hands and given up the 

195 



THE HUMAN WAY 



game, who has submitted to the thraldom of a 
diseased self, is one of the most difficult of works. 
Yet no one can be spared. ''Not a sparrow falleth 
to the ground'' is one of the most difficult of 
scriptures to believe, and to bear in mind that 
there is no completion anywhere while so much as 
one soul lingers in the valley of despair is as hard 
to realise as it is indubitably true. These folk have 
come, like Dante, to the dark wood where the 
''straight way'' is lost, and where sin and sorrow 
and despair lie in wait to trap the falterer. But to 
Dante, remember, the dark was but the opening 
to light. It was after this night in the w^ood, so 
wild, rough and stubborn that even to think on it 
long after, renewed the fear of it, bitter as death, 
that Dante met his guide w^ho offered to lead him 
out of the wood by a road which should show him 
the eternal roots of misery and of joy, where he 
should hear the hopeless shrieks, should see the 
ancient spirits in pain calling for a second death, 
and also see those who are content in the fire of 
trial because they yet hope to come, whensoever 
it shall be, among the blessed. 

The antidote to being bom is virtue; the anti- 
dote to destiny is wisdom. There is no suffering, 
no struggle, no shame that may not justify itself, 
provided the issue be breadth, virtue, and wisdom. 

196 



THE VALUE OF SPECULATION 

And for this end all the powers of the mind and soul 
must be played to the utmost. We are somewhat 
in the habit of divorcing the idea of speculative 
thought from that of usefulness, and of considering 
it a dreamer's vagary without which the world 
would progress along its accustomed and pre- 
destined route. It is particularly the habit of set 
and elderly people to speak with scorn of schools 
of thought, methods of careful preparation for life, 
and abstract consideration of values. They in- 
sist that the world was better off when people did 
things and thought less about them. The diffi- 
culty in leaving ourselves to act without forethought 
is, that we find ourselves prepared only for such 
events as have taken place before within our ex- 
perience or within the experience of those we have 
talked with or read of, whereas we are likely to be 
plunged at any moment into a new set of circum- 
stances or given a new lot of conditions and motives 
which alter the most apparently similar cases. 
Then, indeed, for lack of the habit of speculative 
thought, of weighing motives and values, we are 
apt to drown in our own absurdities or, worse, 
commit hideous injustices. 

Odd as it may seem, the end of speculation is 
practice. The process may seem wasteful and 
futile, but the results, if one examine them, are 

197 



THE HUMAN WAY 



worth the energy spent ; and the lives we see about 
us, lived without the direction of abstract thought, 
are warnings against accepting the cheap and easy 
ways of life. Traditional wisdom, blindly ac- 
cepted, is very likely to result in a stony image of 
life without any smelting, fusing or forming power 
behind it. Every moral maxim must have new 
life added to it as it filters through a new per- 
sonality, or it remains un vivified, without power 
to project new forces or to shed light upon the path 
for those clambering upward. The rules and the 
traditions that sink in, that find the new soil of 
fresh interpretations to nourish them, grow stronger 
roots and fairer blossoms out of the new conditions. 
But the certain thing is that no lifelessly accepted 
traditions will be fruitful. 

The intellectual way to goodness is, it is true, 
fraught with dangers and with pitfalls, and among 
our sorriest modern sights are the free-minded 
thinkers who have set rules aside before they at- 
tained to that love of their kind which inhibited 
injury. It is throwing aside the old dispensation 
before the new one is wholly grasped. A man who 
does this is indeed a leaf in the wind, blown hither 
and yon without will of his own or foothold any- 
where. The so-called artistic temperament, held 
as it is by double threads to the step below and 

198 



THEORY AND PRACTISE 



the step above mere moral obedience, sensitively 
allied to the freedom and the irregularity of nature, 
eagerly and swiftly responsive to the claims of 
love, has the most perilous of mortal journeys to 
make. It undertakes to scale the slippery rocks of 
human mistakes, with no staff to steady itself. It 
takes big risks, but when it succeeds, the result is 
glorious indeed. 

And shall we regret that the faces of such ad- 
venturers are marked by anxiety and uncertainty, 
their feet bruised and bleeding with clinging to 
their perilous foothold ? and that the large serenity, 
the vivid glow of purity and peace which we see in 
the faces of the few surviving Puritans who have 
asked no questions and taken no risks, but have 
come to the end of life safely and serenely with- 
out falls and without mistakes, can never be 
theirs ? 

For we must not forget that rules, mere rules, at 
times do lead man on slowly and securely to a 
higher plane, and he who has never dishonoured his 
Creator nor injured his fellow just because he has 
learned the Ten Commandments and spent his life 
obeying them, is very apt to end on the level where 
it is natural to love goodness with all his heart and 
his neighbour as himself. If the genius or the saint- 
liness to obey rules witho^i^ an anaemic conscious- 

199 



THE HUMAN WAY 



ness or dried-up sympathies be his, he is, perhaps, 
the greater victor. 

For he who comes back into the fold after battles 
on the outside is never quite the same as he who 
has lived inside always. The highest power be- 
longs to the man who has never made mistakes. 
Rules are the quintessence of experience, and it 
would be hard to think that he who willingly sub- 
mitted himself to the laws handed down by the 
wisdom of the ages for the good of humanity, 
should not finally have prepared himself to hear 
the Eternal Voice which delivers us from mere 
opinions about right and wrong. The man, how- 
ever, who has discovered by speculation the vitality 
underlying rules, even if his means of discovery be 
a series of mistakes, is a creator; he has put sig- 
nificance into life. 

The vision of the world is terribly bewildering. 
Right and wrong in their results are harrowing to 
look upon. We have to become accustomed to 
the thought that justice is not so much a super- 
natural revelation as an outcome of human sensi- 
bility, and is slow of growth. It comes upon us at 
times with crushing force that there is no justice 
in chance or fate ; the good man is bared to calam- 
ity, to storm, shipwreck and earthquake, to pov- 
erty and failure, and the wicked man, if he but be 

200 



THE FLOURISHING OF THE WICKED 

canny, is still as in the days of the Psalmist, likely 
to flourish and spread himself as a green bay-tree. 
The singer of the psalms showed an ethical insight 
far in advance of the average human consciousness 
when he made that marvellously poetic effort to 
explain the adjustment of rewards and punish- 
ments in the thirty-seventh psalm, where he had 
to admit that the wicked man usually gained his 
share of the world's goods and prospered exceed- 
ingly, while the utmost that could be promised to 
the righteous was that his seed should not be beg- 
gars and his end should be peace. The law that 
like will unto like, and that rewards are of the 
nature of the effort put forth, is never broken 
down. The whole scheme of punishments and re- 
wards, childishly as we may play with them in 
fancy at times, is simply the law that effort put 
forth calls into being results of like kind unto the 
effort, that a man's life grows into the shape and 
stature of his thoughts and his wishes. It may 
be because we are so apt to say to the little child, 
*'Be good and I'll give you some candy/' that 
the fact like a catapultic stone falls upon youth, 
that the reward of duty done is not praise or 
acclaim or success or prosperity, but simply the 
power to fulfil further duties ; that it is not 
the way of Destiny to answer to man's impatient 

20I 



THE HUMAN WAY 



clamour, but to far-off ends and unsearchable 
issues. 

The religious consciousness leads to a patient 
acquiescence in the higher and ultimate designs of 
Destiny and the strength for self-sacrifice, so that 
such designs may not be even temporarily im- 
peded. The impartial methods of nature with the 
just and the unjust cannot be superseded, nor, 
except in very slight measure, controlled; but the 
ideal of human justice grows steadily. As the 
centuries add to the exactitude of man's sense of 
moral justice, it becomes less and less possible for 
a man to accept those gains which mean another's 
loss. The voluntary embracing of poverty was at 
one time the hall-mark of a saint, and saints were 
looked upon as supematurally dowered. Such 
saints are cast abroad over the earth to-day and 
we look upon them as only a little odd, and won- 
der what disappointments may have taught them 
the worthlessness of earthly goods and the value 
of spiritual rewards. The slum-workers, the social- 
settlement people, the theosophists, and the various 
new sects and creeds which lay stress upon inward 
effort and inward results, lay no claim to a super- 
natural holiness, but simply emphasise the fact 
that results are according to the nature of effort, 
and that peace is not gained by making another 

303 



CAUSE AND EFFECT 



suffer; the aim with them is wider and embraces 
humanity instead of circling a mere personal 
career. If one give one's faith to the theory that 
there is an all-knowing, all-loving creative Intelli 
gence, it follows that such Intelligence would desire 
the welfare, the growth of all creation equally. 
Since God is above hazard and chance, the truth 
must be that imperfect creations are imperfect only 
in so far as they are in process of growth, only 
partially created or dropped as a seed into dark- 
ness, to work the way out into light and into con- 
sciousness. And man, in as far as he acquiesces in 
all creation, will know no limitation of sympathy, 
no barriers of separation, but, like Shelley's per- 
fect man, will learn to become ** equal, unclassed, 
tribeless, and nationless.'' It has been said of St. 
Francis, '*If you had taken him to the loneliest 
star that the madness of an astronomer can con- 
ceive, he would only have beheld in it the features 
of a new friend." This is the reward of the ac- 
quiescent consciousness. Who believes in a loving 
universe shall himself gain such, and no journeys 
through the black coal-sacks of interstellar spaces 
shall divorce him from the loving hope and trust 
he has created. Socrates, who said, *'No evil can 
befall a good man," was not protected from the 
death-penalty, but all the forces of heaven and 

203 



THE HUMAN WAY 



earth could not make him meet death with trepi- 
dation or ignoble fear; he was the victor trans- 
forming the horrible shade into a calm and noble 
visitor. 

A modern writer has said that poetry and religion 
are in essence identical, and differ only in the way 
in which they are attached to practical life. 'Toe- 
try/' he says, *'is called religion when it inter- 
venes in life; when it merely supervenes upon life 
it is seen to be nothing but poetry.'' When that 
which is of farthest sight and most essentially beau- 
tiful, whole in concept, unbiassed by personal con- 
siderations, controls life, it is religion; when it is 
aesthetically contemplated and enjoyed as an adorn- 
ment of consciousness, it is art, but art divested 
of its highest powers. For art is great just in so 
far as it acts upon life and consciousness, and pro- 
ceeds from the sum of courage and truth in the 
creator. 

Religion, then, is the application of the highest 
concepts to conduct, and no one will contend that 
the highest concepts applied to conduct result 
necessarily in prosperity, riches or honours. As the 
psalmist foretold, the righteous man may look to 
have peace in the inward consciousness and to see 
a good disposition in his children; but as religion 
rules only in the realm of the ideal, it has only an 

204 



LIKE BEGETS LIKE 



ideal adequacy. Those who look to virtue to help 
them to prosperity or to shield them from mis- 
chance are allowing themselves to invite the real 
to encroach upon the ideal. The reward of virtue 
is peace, is the sense of having attempted at least 
to apply one's highest concepts to practice in a 
world quite inadequately prepared for such at- 
tempts, and the chances still are that the cunning 
man, the unscrupulous, the self-interested, will 
*' flourish and spread himself like the green bay- 
tree,'' but the end of the righteous is still peace. 

But is religious peace nowadays the final goal of 
the militant soul ? No ; it is only the prepared soil 
in which the modern personality sets its plants. 
If one lay down a volume of religious and philo- 
sophic discourse of the fifteenth century and take 
up one of the present day, one is struck by the 
complete change of face that has taken place in 
five centuries. The advice of time past bears al- 
most entirely upon renunciation: endure with 
fortitude; accept all things as they are, coming in 
just that form from the hand of an all-wise and 
guiding Providence who is training man. To ac- 
cept suffering, to bear it for no other purpose than 
the spiritual exercise of patience and endurance, 
was virtue. **A little suffering," says St. Ber- 
nard, '*is far and away of greater worth than long 

205 



THE HUMAN WAY 



discipline in good works/' And St. Thomas says: 
**A11 suffering, however slight, that can be suffered 
either outwardly or inwardly, is a copy of the most 
precious suffering of our Lord/' John Tauler, in 
his first All-Saints' Day sermon, urges a habit of 
suffering upon his listeners as a chief and fruitful 
source of growth, as the means to eternal salvation, 
adding: *'Man ought, by nature, to suffer rather 
than to work; to receive rather than to give; for 
every such gift increases and ennobles the desire 
for more gifts a thousand times. . . . For God is 
always working and His spirit is always suffering." 
One has only to turn from such pages to the ut- 
terances of living thinkers to realise how man has 
seized the matter of his personal salvation out of the 
hand of Providence to wield it himself, and how 
complete a volte-face he has made in this matter 
of suffering and doing. If George Meredith states 
that there is no pain the body suffers that the soul 
may not grow by, it is not that he extols suffering 
at all, but that he considers it as a means to press 
action out of men. For suffering, per se, folk 
nowadays have very little patience; it is merely 
an obstacle against which a man tries his strength 
and ingenuity. How can we best smooth the way, 
attain health, ease, strength, and have leisure for 
higher pursuits than mere endurance of evil ? Far 

206 



NEW ASPECTS OF RELIGION 

from accepting that eternal and unavoidable residue 
of ill that still remains when the best we know 
has been done, modem thinkers assume one of two 
attitudes: one is to accept it as a means to educe 
power; to stab the sluggish spirit broad awake; 
to keep our faculties alert and harden our sinews 
for fiercer victories, till the misfortunes of fate 
are shrewdly met by one whose strength and vigour 
set him above destiny; or, as a recent philosophy 
meets it, by definitely labelling all misfortune as 
bad — ^as conclusive a verdict upon our finite con- 
ditions as ever the original verdict **good'' was. 

*'In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to 
me that when a view of things is * noble' that ought 
to count as a presumption against its truth, and 
as a philosophic disqualification,'' writes a modern 
philosopher. *'The Prince of Darkness may be a 
gentleman as we are told he is, but whatever the 
God of heaven and earth is, he can surely be no 
gentleman. . . . His menial services are needed in 
the dust of our human trials even more than his 
dignity is needed in the empyrean." 

This is a new and an alien language to the relig- 
ious thinkers of a few centuries back. And yet 
who would call the strenuous truthfulness and 
rugged sincerity of Doctor James's point of view 
other than religious? The main change, then, is 

207 



THE HUMAN WAY 



that more and more man prepares himself inward- 
ly, decorates the secret places of the soul — takes 
his destiny into his hands, less and less flings off 
into the region of the unknown and the unknow- 
able the problem of God's ways with man. If he 
accepts suffering he uses it, either to strengthen 
his moral muscle or to justify his philosophy. He 
bears less, he exacts more, he uses more. This 
may merely mean an increase of sensitiveness. 
With what stolidity the men of a past age bore the 
eternal damnation of their fellows ! But nowadays 
there are few among men thick-skinned enough to 
accept a heaven haunted by shrieks of others' 
far-off hell, and here is our philosopher who will 
none of an Absolute who will not come down into 
the sweat and dirt and misery of human life and 
cope with them by our sides. 

This demand that religion should bring about a 
literal brotherhood of man and extension of sym- 
pathy and good works, results in a tendency to 
take the external forms of religion more lightly, 
since we have seen them fail in the one religious 
end, the care of mankind under an all -loving 
fatherhood of God. Twenty centuries of Christi- 
anity have failed to produce a beneficent relation 
among men, a preparation for the life out of the 
body, a compensation for the mortality and muta- 

208 



THE USE OF SYMBOLS 



bility of human life, a power to overcome the world 
and gain peace in ourselves. Men have lost them- 
selves in the multiplication of good works and 
have forgotten that the outer life must yet lean 
against the secret life, and that external deeds must 
be the blossoming of hidden thoughts. 

The tendency of intellectual men is to discard 
symbols and to say that the heart is all, the in- 
tention all. The fallacy in such argument seems 
to be that no intention, no mood gains validity and 
reality until it takes shape in the concrete world; 
and a frame of mind, a motion of heart, therefore, 
of their very nature create symbols, and turn back 
to them again as reminders when the original im- 
pulse is faint. An inspiration toward righteous- 
ness must be very vague indeed that does not re- 
sult in a duty performed, an obligation accepted, 
or some sort of commemoration. 

Dogma, from which certain types of mind so 
instinctively shrink, is, after all, but a dialectical 
development of symbols whereby the heart may 
intensify a memory or renew an original impulse 
of approach to the larger life beyond the self. All 
knowing is analogy. We conceive only by com- 
parison, by similarity and its negative, and every- 
thing, as has been said already, in being what it is, 
is the symbol of something more. To Blake the 
14 209 



THE HUMAN WAY 



sun was not a round globe of fire but an innumer- 
able company of the heavenly host; and to what 
man is nature a mere collection of earthly irregu- 
larities, set in atmosphere and grown upon with 
plants, rather than the language whereby the In- 
finite communicates with man? From time im- 
memorial, rites and usages and mysteries have been 
the projection of man's need to signify something 
beyond his power of speech or rational thought. 
That is the infinite in us striving to break bounds. 
It matters little that, to certain types of mind, 
the sign is confused with the substance for which 
it stands. We are not all on the same level, nor 
for many ages shall we be. The fact that many 
misuse a symbol or misinterpret a dogma is in 
itself no real reason for discarding them. The 
universe as it comes to us is all symbolical, all 
reminiscent, all a suggestion. Would one wish to 
blame the little boy who, driving through a for- 
eign city, suddenly threw up his cap and shouted 
because on a distant building he saw his country's 
flag? With what a rush it brought back to him 
in an alien and indifferent land the whole love of 
the whole life! Probably at home the thought of 
love of country would have had but little meaning 
for him, but away, where that uppermost interest 
was strange and unnoted by all about him, a few 

2IO 



THE STEEP PATH 



bars and stars, painted on a rag and hung from 
a stick, stood for a wealth of loyalty, devotion, 
power of self-sacrifice. For the symbol implies 
absence and presence, pain and joy. Even so does 
the cup stand for us as a reminder of charity, even 
unto self-immolation and death, from the cup of 
cold water offered unto the least of the little ones, 
to the cup which could not pass away until it had 
become the cup of the sacramental commemora- 
tion of the world. The use, then, of the symbol is 
to stimulate emotion, to remind us of those trail- 
ing clouds of glory, of which, somewhere in ''the 
dim backward and abysm" of his mind, each man 
is vaguely aware. The height of the significance 
of a dogma must depend upon the zeal with which 
one has trodden the path toward the goal. There 
are many ways that lead thereto, but as one gets 
farther from the sensuous, the paths are strait and 
steep, and silence and isolation guard one on either 
hand. 

Let the symbol, then, do its work, to each mind 
according to the mind's own need. Is it not arro- 
gant to presuppose our own way the only one or 
the best? What man, indeed, can be farther from 
God than that limited one who attempts to inter- 
pret God's mind ? In fear and trembling, in aspir- 
ing and renewed effort, we listen, listen for the 

211 



THE HUMAN WAY 



command, solacing but not judging, lest indeed 
we shall be judged again. 

There are Protestants who scoff at the Catholic 
because he says that his Lord is ''actually'' pres- 
ent at the altar. But what does ''actually'* 
mean? Is the Spirit of Righteousness and Free- 
dom not present wherever men seek Him, on the 
cross, in the cup, in the "still, small voice,'' or in 
the thick darkness? Where best we seek, there 
most He is. And it is rather a matter of rejoicing 
than of scoffing that we seek in different places, 
under varying guises. What a fragrant close of 
pleasantness and intimacy that must have been 
to the harassed and overworked dressmaker who 
told her customer: " It would be too much for me, 
but I get up every morning early and go into the 
church over there, and sit a little while with Our 
Lord." And surely, surely Our Lord met her 
there; as surely as He met Moses in the burning 
bush or Elijah in the still, small voice. For what- 
ever the great Spirit of Righteousness be, over and 
above our pitiful small guesses and futile gropings. 
He is the spirit of response and mercy and love, in 
whom is no change neither shadow of turning. 

It was a great French thinker who, after much 
doubt and questioning, finally felt the answer: 
"Be comforted! had you not found me you would 

212 



THE SEARCH AND THE SOUGHT-FOR 

not seek me." That is a profound thought. The 
sought-for is also the search, and there is no more 
infallible sign of the Presence than the seeking 
after Him. Nor need the search bring joy and 
peace. The chain of cause and effect is long 
and intricate, the chase is the impatient hastening 
after what is not yet complete, and it may mean 
most exquisite pain. To hope for righteousness 
and to know ourselves, can this be other than 
anguish, and yet anguish not without its hope of 
assuagement? For the signs and the promises of 
perfection are everywhere, and the symbols of hope 
are eternal. 

We do not habitually know the whole of our- 
selves. There is an inward depth of aspiration in 
each man which he only feels at moments and after 
some effort. Even then it is little more than an 
evanescent glimpse that he gets of his whole desire 
and aim, a desire which means complete escape 
from the habitual self. ''Thus the disciple of life, 
the chrysalis of an angel, works through his ideal, 
his own future rebirth. The divine life is a series 
of successive deaths in which the spirit cuts off 
its imperfections and yields to the growing attrac- 
tion of the centre of inevitable gravitation— -the 
sun of intelligence and love.'' But this is no in- 
stinctive process. It is not accomplished by dis- 

213 



THE HUMAN WAY 



carding symbols and external forms. It is more 
nearly to be accomplished by refusing to rest con- 
tent with the outer form, by a persistent pressing 
on through the form to the inward meaning and 
end of all form, an absorption into the essence and 
significance of life. And doubtless as this is ac- 
complished, more and more the promises of the 
religious life are confirmed. We shall find our 
human relations taking on unsuspected beneficence 
and scope, the life embodied will be more and more 
a graspable idea, the inevitable sorrows of life will 
cease to be withering, and the courage which is 
faith in the infinite, and the peace which passes 
understanding, will be ours. 

In the Book of Commion Prayer there is a petition 
that in this world we may have knowledge of the 
truth and in the world to come life everlasting. 
It is impossible to repeat the beautiful and time- 
sanctified appeal without realising that complete- 
ness of knowledge is very slow of response, and 
that it is more probable that in worlds to come 
we shall grow slowly — oh, how slowly! — into knowl- 
edge of the truth, and in this world we shall be 
aware of the dawning of life everlasting. 

Alongside of agnosticism and scientific proofs of 
death goes an ever-increasing sense of life ever- 
lasting. One remembers the professor who re- 

214 



THE PRACTICE OF IiMMORTALITY 

sponded to his student's impassioned and zealous 
refutation of the existence of an immortal soul: 
** Perhaps you are right. / have an immortal soul, 
but very probably you have none/' Browning, 
as he listened to the dirge of fair Venetian wom- 
en, exclaimed: ''The soul doubtless is immortal, 
where a soul can he discerned.'' ''Never think 
of death,'' wrote Lewis Nettleship, shortly before 
his own passing, "death is nothing." It is per- 
haps true that we extend life into other spheres 
by our desire and by our will. Perhaps to this 
instinctively creating, appraising, willing self, 
which is born, we must add intent and persevering 
desire. Certainly some souls seem nearer life ever- 
lasting and some farther away. Should the law of 
this life hold good in other realms, demand will have 
something to do with supply. To stretch roots 
down deep into life and the constitution of the 
universe, to spread branches far out over life and 
phenomena, to feel existence gripping hold of, in- 
cluding and covering more life and more existences, 
is to come even here and now into the feeling of 
immortality. Who lives persistently in the thought 
of life without end, has he not already tasted im- 
mortality ? It is something never to have faced 
an ending, never to have felt finality, never to have 
come to terms with an ultimate. To fail, and fail, 

2IS 



THE HUMAN WAY 



and fail again, as a brave soldier must, and fight 
with renewed vigour every time, to hold in hand 
all the experience and knowledge and power of 
many defeats and march on anew with them to a 
higher and a further victory, is to grow into the 
feeling of life everlasting. The victor of life must 
always lay the ghosts of his personal sorrows, he 
must press on until even the star of his inborn 
destiny lies below his feet, mastered and outsped. 
And who can conceive of a great victor of destiny 
vanquished by Death? When he passes beyond 
our vision it is to set alight the black passages and 
unlighted chambers of the future. 

Who lives in the consciousness of life without 
end, lives with a different courage from his who 
lives trying to make life out of the poor changes 
contained in threescore years and ten. And to 
live in the consciousness of immortality may mean 
something very different from a desire to describe 
dogmatically what the great mysteries of con- 
sciousness beyond this embodiment may be. It 
may mean only the continuous effort to inquire 
into the true nature of things. To study persist- 
ently as only those can who love steadfastly and 
nobly the structure of the life in which we move 
and have our being; to weave our enterprises 
deeply into the woof of all human life ; to identify 

216 



CONTINUITY OF AGENCY 

ourselves with all that is offered to us here— this 
is somehow to posit our continuance in the flow of 
time and the revolution of the worlds. 

"We taste 
The pleasure of believing what we see 
Is boundless as we wish our so\ils to be.'* 

Mr. Balfour, in a recent address to the British 
Association of Science, pointed out that the very- 
solidity of matter, one of the firmest convictions 
of man, is melting away under recent electrical in- 
vestigation. '*It may seem singular,'' he said, 
*'that down to five years ago our race has, without 
exception, lived and died in a world of illusions, 
and that these illusions have not been about things 
remote and abstract, things transcendental and 
divine, but about what men see and handle, about 
those plain matters of fact among which common 
sense moves with its most confident step and most 
self-satisfied smile." Perhaps the sense which 
most distinctly marks off the mystic from the man 
in the street is that which forbids a mortal to put 
his whole trust in the witness of the senses. He 
has always had a secret knowledge that the created 
world is but a symbol of something greater, some- 
thing ungrasped. 

In the pubhshed fragments of Nettleship's letters 

217 



THE HUMAN WAY 



there are some very interesting attempts at seeing 
life in just proportions; seeing whole and in un- 
broken continuity that which we usually come at 
in fragments. In a wonderful passage on the sig- 
nificance of the Eucharist, he follows up the rational 
significance of the ceremony — neither the preva- 
lent view that the eating of bread and drinking of 
wine are commemorative signs or symbols, nor the 
more orthodox view that the elements are miracu- 
lously transformed substances, seems to him to 
state the gist of the matter. But what he points 
out is the unbroken continuity of agency ; the very 
simplest act of eating is an act in virtue of which 
a given material coming in contact with another 
actually produces a third with new properties and 
new powers of further creation, so that in the sim- 
plest and realest way bread may become, as an 
agent, an element in an artistic, moral, or spiritual 
result. It may therefore quite literally beget a 
picture, a brave act, the power to overcome temp- 
tation. And instead of ceasing to eat and drink 
in order to be holy, or to eat and drink in some 
special ceremonial, every bite of food might be 
taken literally to the glory of God and the building 
up of a spiritual kingdom. The whole mystic tend- 
ency is not so much to hallow one's self by special 
exercises in special places, but to raise all the proc- 

218 



THE BLESSING 



esses of life into a realm of sanctity. The mystic 
realises life as a process of assimilation; one thing 
being assimilated by another, and producing some- 
thing different from either agency. Continuity and 
wholeness, those aspects we are so likely to lose 
hold of in our rough and ready modes of dealing 
with the universe, are yet the very heart of the 
mystery into which we are being initiated. 

It is the mystic, therefore, who comes nearest 
to the common-sense truth of things. He recog- 
nises the mystery of existence. He refuses to ex- 
plain it away by any formula or set of words. If 
he draws lines and cuts things into sections it is 
merely for convenience's sake, and inwardly he 
knows that there is no break in the continuity of 
life. For no fragment can really be broken off 
from the whole; and neither death, nor life, nor 
angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things 
present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth 
shall separate us from the searching love of God, 
beyond which no soul can drift. 

It is quite in the nature of things that mysticism 
should have cheap and hysterical developments. 
On the perilous edge between two worlds, the visible 
and the invisible, many become giddy and fall, or 
lose their heads and turn back to some cheap and 
easy formula which they can make popular. But 

219 



THE HUMAN WAY 



the real mystic is the last to take refuge in words. 
His journey is toward an understanding silence and 
awe. The profounder his search, the briefer his 
account will be, and the more the effect will be 
shown merely in his power of living and loving. 
He can fight the fight, keep the faith and endure 
the torture. If his first demand, ''Tell me thy 
name,'' go unanswered, yet surely his asseveration, 
*'I will not let thee go till thou bless me,'' has its 
response. For since the first breath of mysticism 
swept over the Aryan race, he has known how to 
overcome fear and desire and substitute love in 
their place, since only so do we let down the bar- 
riers of our little selves and emerge into the larger 
self. 

And surely he has borne away a blessing of as- 
surance and content even in the present cloudy 
aspect of mortal things. For his joys grow neither 
out of accumulation of things nor out of the sense 
of progress, but from a profound appreciation of 
the vision of life spread before him ; the exercise of 
his faculties, faith and hope and love being the 
greatest among them, and the realisation that the 
eternal life is in the moment, at any turn, when we 
win the power of knowing it; and that it is not 
the moments that fly from us, but we who in our 
light and casual instability are continually turn- 

220 



THE MYSTIC'S PROGRESS 

ing from them. But as we gain in depth of con- 
sciousness we shall surely see the whole vision 
of life spread before us, an eternal, perfected pos- 
session. And toward this ampler vision the mystic 
moves. 



VIII 
SOLITUDE 

THE fashions of the world change bit by bit 
and that which was the necessity of one age 
becomes the luxury of another. In the leisurely 
days of a centur}^ ago when people described the 
casual fluctuations of their thoughts and feelings in 
voluminous letters, which when gathered together 
and published make two or three portly volumes, 
there must have been not only more time but a 
great deal more space in the world. There must 
have been plenty of wholesome solitude and room 
for a person to sit down alone with himself and get 
acquainted. Nowadays not only is intimate con- 
verse with ourselves difficult but society is almost 
obligatory. Gregariousness is a moral creed. We 
live in a world of society and societies, of clubs and 
philanthropies, organised and co-operative labour 
and leisure, and whatever the deprivations of mod- 
ern man miay be, it would seem that he is always 
amply supplied with the presence of his neighbour. 

222 



GREGARIOUS LIVING 



Telephones have facilitated an almost uninter- 
rupted interchange of trivial comment, expensive 
emotions flit airily over telegraph wires, and the 
cables and wireless have annulled the loneliness of 
the sea. We begin to wonder what will becomxC 
of the old, time-worn emotions if once we get rid 
of the sense of distance and separation. The pain 
of parting, the solenmity of long good-byes amount- 
ing almost to a foretaste of the pangs of death, the 
yearnings for the absent and anxieties for the dis- 
tant, seemi doomed to drop out of life. We are 
half afraid to say *' good-bye'' with any sort of 
seriousness lest, by unexpected readjustment, a 
return steamer deposit our friend by our side in a 
fortnight or less and w^e find the gravity of our 
emotions unjustified. I do not complain that life 
is made easier and brighter by modern inventions, 
but I cannot but wonder if all the noise and bustle 
and unending activity are going to lessen the hu- 
man capacity for thinking and feeling. Undoubt- 
edly, unalleviated gregariousness, constant diver- 
sion from the profounder interests of life, makes 
for a superficial consciousness. 

Youth, of course, loves diversion, companion- 
ships and publicity. Getting acquainted with the 
inner life and thought and motive is not a gay or 
diverting exercise in the beginning, and youth is 

223 



THE HUMAN WAY 



more concerned to enjoy than to know. Out of 
sheer abundance of vitality, of course, it keeps up 
a certain amount of feeling, but alas, youth dissi- 
pates emotion by feeling aloud. All the literature 
of confession, all the outbursts of unhappy wives 
and forsaken lovers and neglected geniuses, testify 
to this inherent instinct in the young to make a 
noise about themselves, to strive, and cry out upon 
the world to hear while they voluminously explain 
themselves. But this form of publicity is futile 
and a mistake. There comes an inevitable turning- 
point. Maturity makes a volte-face; self-knowledge 
yearns for silence. There comes an age at which 
one is haunted by the fear that he shall be under- 
stood, and one seeks refuge in the obvious rather 
than submit to publicity. When a man really 
comes to know himself he prefers to do it in silence. 
There is a kind of joy in private pursuits, a sacred- 
ness attaching to personal emotions, a power of 
growth in reserve which warns a man from the 
mere dissipating of energies in explanations. Youth 
may fancy any mention better than none, and any 
form of notoriety distinguished, but it is an un- 
desirable truth that those of whom there is most 
to say are those who most persistently court pri- 
vacy. The reason is palpable. It is the half -grown, 
the incomplete, and inadequate life that seeks 

224 



SELF-KNOWLEDGE 



support outside. The distraction of gossip and 
unending small activities and curiosities save men 
from the emptiness of themselves. The puffing and 
blowing and steaming is a method of letting off 
energy which, contained, might move an engine. 
Power is reserve and reserve is power. The weak 
man and the ignorant man overflow with explana- 
tions and autobiographical data, but that which 
makes a life well worth living out is the quiet 
growth in understanding, the penetration to the 
significance hidden behind appearances, the recon- 
ciliation with one's own soul, and energetic carry- 
ing out of that soul's purposes. This is not accom- 
plished by noise and distraction ; it is accomplished 
by the quiet gathering in of the powers, by a rigid 
choosing of places and pursuits, by the habit of 
listening to the inward voices of the silence. 

So youth loses, by constant intercourse, the power 
and the meaning of emotion, and, worse and more 
important, loses its chance to gain self-knowledge. 
The human soul develops in its body by grave and 
beautiful thoughts, long treasured in the silence, 
allowed to put down roots in the dark before they 
are set in the glare of publicity. 

**Let men live," said Maeterlinck, *'as an angel 
just born lives, or as a woman in love, or a man 
about to die." This is the significant insight into 
IS 225 



THE HUMAN WAY 



life, and surely it is a view which turns hastily from 
a vulgar and a futile publicity. In his moment of 
grave and strong emotion a man seeks a cell, and 
when he emerges it is not for the purpose of ex- 
plaining his absence, but to do the deeds of courage 
and support which shall show men the meaning of 
the private life, the withdrawal, the hidden vigil. 

*'The thoughts that come with doves' feet rule 
the world.*' The great messages, the words of last- 
ing significance sound only through the stillness. 
It is when, apart from all men, we listen, listen for 
the thoughts dove-footed, that we come to know 
ourselves and our powers, and out of the solitude 
draw lines in the real world. 

Life, the infinite and the illimitable, lies before 
us, awaiting its garments of art ; to be clothed upon 
with form and colour and words; but who will 
weave the garment must first be able to look at life 
from a still shelter. To see life simply and sin- 
cerely, to realise how much of it lies beyond us and 
inattentive to us, to accept — nay, to have accepted 
— one's little place in the universe and have ceased 
to wail and struggle for a larger point of vantage : 
these are the established conditions of production. 
And any sincere and simple record, conscientiously 
made by unremitting, assiduous observation and 
reflection, is an achievement, adds to the docu- 

226 



THE POWER OF SILENCE 

mentary evidence of what this human life is and 
may be. **I set down what I see, what I feel, 
what I have lived, writing it as well as I am able,'' 
was J. K. Huysmans' account of his wonderful 
human documents. Kipling, too, tells how, in 
early youth, when he first set out to write, his 
method was to set down in black and white, with- 
out preference or prejudice, such matters as passed 
before him when he was still enough to watch. 

The producer must have faith that his percep- 
tions are worth something, that they have their 
meaning, their reliability, their value in the scheme 
of things ; and who keeps his mind and his percep- 
tions plastic, who refuses to crystallise or settle into 
a mould, shall find that achievement will grow out 
of still perceptions. 

It is interesting to reflect that the great body of 
poetry, certainly most lyric poetry, the elegies, 
threnodies and meditations, are the direct outcome 
of the loneliness and silence in which a man had 
leisure to feel, to think over, to come to understand 
his own emotions. He adorns the spot into which 
no man enters by turning over and over, beautify- 
ing, enlarging, enriching all his thoughts and feel- 
ings, making them more and more truly his, a part 
of himself, because he has time to nourish and culti- 
vate them before they are cast upon the world to 

227 



THE HUMAN WAY 



be tempered and polished and worn smooth by 
contact with others. It is in solitude only that we 
face true love, deep sorrow, death. 

**I know you, solitary griefs, 

Desolate passions, aching hours, 
I know you, tremulous beliefs, 

Agonised hopes and ashen flowers." 

It is certainly in solitude that the life of dream 
and vision wakes for us, and all who know it at all 
can testify that it offers solace in circumstances 
which might otherwise be totally unbearable. 
When we speak of the significance of dreams and 
of visions, we are at once on perilous ground, for 
we are dealing with that which is for the person 
speaking very vital, but which borders upon the 
incommunicable. In speaking of any wholly in- 
ward experience, we find difficulty in making an 
exact statement. The fact is so intimately of our- 
selves that it is by its nature tinged with personality 
and, at best, can be little more than a subjectively 
coloured impression. 

The extent to which dreams mean anything to 
the waking man depends greatly upon tempera- 
ment. The abiUty to register dreams on the wak- 
ing consciousness varies and the rationale of dream- 
life is widely divergent in different people. The 
more literal and prosaic the mind in waking life, 

228 



THE GATE TO DREAMS AND VISIONS 

the more utterly irrational and incoherent the 
dream-life is apt to be, but naive and impressionable 
natures, those natures that are ever alert to the 
winds that blow over the spirit, seem to receive 
warnings and refreshment and outlook from the 
hours when the upper intelligence rests. To chil- 
dren, particularly, the experiences of dream-life are 
extremely real, pleasure-giving or terrifying. The 
mind then is little ruled by reason, and it has surely 
often happened that the recurrent and dominating 
dreams of childhood seem to bear some presage 
or warning of mature life. St. Augustine, though 
speaking guardedly, admits that visions may be 
granted by the mediation of angels, and all religious 
systems of thought produce men in whom the bar- 
riers of the self seem somewhat let down, so that 
the voices from the silence can break in upon them. 
Certainly, it is when the forced activity of the 
brain, set in motion and kept going by the power 
of the will, is quiescent, that the profoundest of 
our thoughts flower in us. Whether this proves 
that the best of our thought flows in upon us from 
without or that the brain works best and is more 
fully at one when self-conscious effort is stilled, or 
whether it proves, as many believe, that so-called 
feeling or intuition is deeper than reason, it is diffi- 
cult to say, but it would seem to be certain that, 

229 



THE HUMAN WAY 



as Maeterlinck says, there are more profound and 
more interesting regions than those of reason and 
intelligence. Something surely is to be gained by 
cultivating the stillness in ourselves and by learn- 
ing to register the incoherent dream-life upon the 
upper intelligence and to judge it. 

It was nothing more authoritative than a vision 
that turned St. Paul from his path of human glory 
to martyrdom. It was a vision which sent St. 
Theresa to her vocation. St. Francis held the 
Christ-child in his arms, and St. Catherine saw the 
heavens open and the Judge upon His throne when 
she needed solace. Blake transcended the sorrow 
of the death of his best-beloved because he saw the 
soul as it escaped from the body, making skyward, 
and clapping its hands for joy, and his communing 
with that soul was never interrupted by its dis- 
embodiment. Tennyson was wont in boyhood, 
when alone, to repeat his own name over and over 
to himself, till out of the consciousness of indi- 
viduality, individuality seemed to dissolve and fade 
away into boundless being, and this not in a con- 
fused state but in a clear and sure one, so that 
death seemed to him impossibility and the loss of 
personality seemed not extinction but the true life. 

But of these dreams that warn us of dangers 
and of deaths, or strange symbolical settings that 



AT ANY TURN 



seem to foreshadow our future, it is more difficult 
to give account. I know of a person who, having 
come to the turning-point between youth and ma- 
turity, dreamed that he was travelling over a wide 
and level land, a dreary and unbroken stretch of 
colourless waste. The journey was accompanied 
by inexplicable sensations of terror and of dreari- 
ness until, lifting his eyes, he saw approaching him 
in the car an old friend who said: ** Don't touch 
me, but don't be afraid. I too have made this 
journey.'' At that a screen was suddenly put 
around the dreamer on three sides, so that he could 
only look out over the waste of landscape. When 
he questioned what it meant the answer came: 
*' Your friend says you must never look back again, 
you must never look around, you must look straight 
forward." The dream had significance, for it 
proved that the friend who had appeared was in- 
deed strangely removed from that time forth, and 
that the whole condition of life of the dreamer was 
such that he was projected into the future, and the 
life of the past and of the moment were ever after 
shut off from him. 

There is a transforming power in dreams — a 
power which presents itself under rigid restrictions 
to the waking sense, but which seem^s to work under 
wider laws when it addresses itself to the passive 

231 



THE HUMAN WAY 



mind. After all, what we mainly infer is, that the 
limitations of the self are not fixed, not definitely 
determined. There seems to be a possibility of 
knowledge shorn of the processes of knowledge, 
and we have more avenues of perception than as 
yet we actually realise. 

But surely the dream- voices never break in upon 
noisy living. Plotinus spoke of his own death as 
''the flight of the Alone to the Alone,*' admitting 
how all his life he had recognised and become 
content with the soul's inevitable loneliness; and 
what more beautiful outlook can we take, when we 
say a last farewell to poor mortality, than the re- 
turn of the isolated to Him who without the return 
of each and every soul must dwell in eternal lone- 
liness? Pythagoras, too, was wont to ask the ap- 
plicants who came for admission to his school if 
they could walk alone and in untrodden paths, 
before they were admitted. The cloistral life made 
allowances for this need of man. Thomas a Kem- 
pis never tires of enumerating the benefits a man 
may derive from being alone. ''Read, write, 
mourn and pray," he insists, and adds: "No man 
can safely speak but he that would rather hold his 
peace. No man can safely appear abroad but he 
that would rather abide at home.'' 

The little oases of loneliness that fall as the share 

232 



THE CELL OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE 

of most of us in the midst of our daily adventures, 
yet serve to sharpen our hearing of life as it slips 
past us, to deepen somewhat our joys and sorrows 
and to intensify our consciousness of this little 
space of time between an eternity and an eternity; 
they give us a moment to gird our loins and take 
our strength in hand that the meaning we put into 
the thousand little daily activities may not be too 
trivial. They are the silent watches where we 
transform our scraps of observation into reflection. 
It is difficult at times to know where to find a 
cell of stillness, but sometimes, like other bless- 
ings, solitude comes upon us unawaited and un- 
sought. A friend forgets an engagement, and as 
we drop into the easy-chair to wait, time stops and 
the hour becomes a thousand years; absorbed in 
the flickering shadows that play magic on the walls, 
or intently listening to the click of the flames as 
they eat up the coals, we find the space of quiet 
awaking a dead past, bringing lost friends to our 
side, rousing a current of larger, quieter and more 
acquiescent thoughts, and we have a sense of the 
spherical unity of being which we lose in the push 
and the rush of every-day existence. Or the hour 
falls after a storm, when water pipes are frozen and 
wires down and none dares venture to move; then 
we sit in our undusted rooms — and dust, let it be 

233 



THE HUMAN WAY 



noted, has its own poetic glamour — reading and 
meditating, seeing a strange haze of unfamiliarity 
come over the commonplace aspect of things and 
our minds grow alive with new suggestion and sig- 
nificance. The same feeling may awaken when we 
pass, an absolute stranger, through the dusk of a 
foreign city. Here, unknown and unknowing, 
watching but un watched, free of all chance of in- 
terruption and intrusion of expectation, the peace 
of loneliness may fold us in and we may be as self- 
aware as an invisible ghost passing among men, 
but affecting no man. 

There is, too, ever at hand the cell of self-knowl- 
edge open and ready to receive us when we are 
willing to open the doors and go in. It was the 
incomparable Emperor himself, the best of all 
authorities, who told us that to rush about seeking 
retreat in the mountains, in country-houses, and 
by the sea-shore was the mark of the commonest 
men, and that it was always in our power to retreat 
within ourselves; for nowhere, either with more 
quiet or more freedom from care, does a man retire 
than into his own soul, particularly when he has 
within him such thoughts as bring him tranquil- 
lity. ''And I affirm," writes the Emperor, **that 
tranquillity is nothing else than the good ordering 
of the mind." The beginning of knowing ourselves, 

234 



SELF-EXAMINATION 



especially if we begin late in life, is like to be a pain- 
ful process; if, by happy hazard, we escape meeting 
a sinful person, we are still very apt to meet a vain 
and egotistical one, or a flippant pleasure-seeker, 
and none such are good for the close intimacies of 
constant communion. Those religious faiths that 
taught self-examination and confession as a part 
of practice had this element of good, that they 
aimed at introducing a man to himself, and any 
sincere and sinful person could procure the ac- 
quaintance, could learn to make the retreat into 
himself not only a possible and bearable matter, 
but ultimately what it was intended to be, a refuge 
from the casualties and storms of life. There one 
may take stock of one's capacities and choose what 
to develop, sift one's interests and know which to 
pursue in order to gain the tranquillity which in 
the great Emperor seemed to be unshakable. There 
one grows to understand that by the multiplicity 
of our perceptions are our feelings and relations en- 
larged. There is no harm in having an absorbed 
interest in bonnets, but if one adds thereto an 
absorbed interest in the courses of the stars one 
gains a certain peacefulness of disposition which 
bonnets, unattended, cannot give. It may seem a 
non sequitur, but in reality a knowledge of flowers 
and their ways and habits, a sincere love of their 

235 



THE HUMAN WAY 



beauty, will do more than sermons to control a 
high temper; a knowledge of poetry banishes fear; 
and a taste for metaphysics endows with tolerance. 
To meet ourselves alone and to get acquainted is 
to take stock of our perceptions and interests, and 
to enlarge and improve them in whatever way we 
find necessary to make ourselves agreeable and im- 
proving acquaintances. To find that a large part 
of our unconscious mental energy is spent in idle 
wishing for money or fame or accessories is a griev- 
ous matter, for we are well aware that a time will 
come when to have owned a palace or to have 
walked past one daily will be one and the same 
thing, and the only matter of import will be the 
kind of spirit that owned or walked. 

'' Behold,'' says Montaigne, '' what it is to choose 
treasures well; to hide them in a place where no 
man may enter, and which cannot be betraied but 
by ourselves; altogether one's own and wholly 
free, wherein we may hoard up and stablish our 
true liberty, there to discourse and meditate and 
laugh . . . having a mind moving and turning in 
itself; it may keep itself companie; it hath where- 
with to offend and defend, wherewith to receive and 
wherewith to give." 

Certain it is that a man who is never alone is 
hardly more than the hull of a man, and no aq- 

236 



THE REFUGE OF GENIUS 

quaintance with the outside world can equal an 
intimate self-knowledge. All effectiveness, all pow- 
er is the outgrowth of a man's secret converse, and 
it is the quality of our solitude and silence that is 
named personality and reveals us as we are to 
other men. 

Genius has especially the power of self-knowl- 
edge. A mind moving and turning in itself, 
thoroughly self -acquainted, knows not only its 
changing surfaces but its abiding depths. It has 
access to the cell and can call upon the whole self, 
the united powers. 

Indeed what we call genius, as distinguished from 
talent, or learning, or accompUshment, is really a 
power of strong appeal to the great masses of man- 
kind w^hich grows out of profound self-knowledge. 
Probably the method of genius is simpler than it 
looks to the baffled outsider, who sees merely the 
effect and is dazzled by the mystery. The genius 
plumbs deeper into his own nature to bring forth 
utterance, and at bottom all human beings are 
akin. It is the outer shells, the upper crusts of 
ourselves that vary, and beneath these, in all of 
us, lie the same fundamental longings and desires, 
the same hopes, the same griefs, the self-same 
destiny. All together, we hang poised between the 
two eternities ot past and future, with the same 

237 



THE HUMAN WAY 



questioning eyes set upon a distant goal, wavering 
between the solutions: — endless dark and dusti- 
ness, or endless growth in power and light. 

When Kipling writes of the time-expired soldier 
man, whom he really uses to give expression to the 
mental attitude of the man of letters, weary with 
the ways of learning, and going to rest in the sim- 
plicity which is at the pinnacle of complexity, as 
the soldier goes home to his country, his mother 
and his maid, — 

"O, I have come upon the books 
And often broke a barrick rule, 
And stood beside and watched myself 
Be'avin' like a bloomin' fool," 

he touches one of those fundamental truths to 
which all men glow a sudden assent. All of us 
who are given to retrospection, all but the most 
fatuous and satisfied, have ''stood beside," and 
wondered by what inexorable fatality we were pre- 
ordained, upon all the important occasions of life, 
to behave so like a " bloomin' fool.'' The only con- 
solation is to realise that others are very much 
less concerned about us than we are, and so the 
crassness of our conduct is mainly glaring to our- 
selves and we can fairly well count upon no more 
cruel comment from our indulgent fellow-man than 
a yawn or shrug of the shoulders. 

238 



THE WHOLE SELF 



If one questions what it is that keeps up this 
strange division in us, that is more humiliated by 
a fit of absent-mindedness or a social contretemps 
than by an actual unkindness or injustice, this con- 
stant sense of a trembling shyness and hesitating 
incapacity that speak and act, and this quiet self 
that ** stands beside" and smiles and judges, we 
find that we are in the habit of living only with a 
small part of ourselves. We let some quality take 
possession of us and act for us, and when we call 
the real self, the whole, collected self, to sit in 
judgment, it weeps, or at very best it smiles in 
amusement at the pitifulness of our coping with 
life, when vanity or self -consciousness, irritabil- 
ity or anger, hold us in sway and act through 
us. 

There are many people whom we know through 
correspondence, through their work, through re- 
sults, whom we profoundly admire, and yet meet- 
ing them is a dangerous matter. We are so apt 
to find them pitifully human after all. Then, 
again, there are people of whose living we can find 
no visible results adequate to the charm, the beauty, 
the wisdom of their daily course. We wonder why 
pictures and music and poems do not drop from 
them as they pass, so exquisite is the spirit with 
which they meet the circumstances of the moment. 

239 



THE HUMAN WAY 



Well, it seems to be a matter of collectedness. 
*'Men vary/' a sage said, ''according to the swift- 
ness of their responses to the infinite." How much 
of one's real self can a man collect on the spur of 
the moment and bring into play during the badi- 
nage of a dinner-party? How much of the im- 
mortal spirit, the part which, in our serious mo- 
ments, we actually deem worthy to endure beyond 
the threescore years and ten, can we put into 
fighting the wind and the mud, the whips and 
scorns and contumelies of chance? How much of 
big serenity can we gather into the smile that ac- 
cepts our inevitable failures? Men vary in great- 
ness really in proportion as they can act from the 
whole self rather than from the partial self. A 
sage, a genius, a great man habitually acts from 
the whole self. Prejudice, desire, inherited and 
habitual leanings, fear, are in abeyance to the 
whole self which ''stands beside." Its treasure is 
not of the earth, nor of time; it neither stands nor 
falls by the small happenings of the moment ; it is 
not consumed by any sense of gain or loss. It has 
the serenity, aye, the gladsomeness, of the great 
Venite with which we open our lips on the first 
day when first we sing at Mattins. It is the same 
confidence with which Pippa, on her holiday, 
carolled : 

240 



SHAKESPEARE 



*' God's in His Heaven, 
Airs right with the world!" 

This recollection, this holding of the casual and the 
temporal seli to its immovable and everlasting part, 
is the secret of charm, the basis of judgment, the 
foundation for a sense of proportionate values, and 
the crowning gift of genius. 

Fancy the detachment of Shakespeare! He 
lived apparently with zeal and interest the most 
commonplace of lives; he was an actor, a play- 
wright, a stage-manager, with somewhere at the 
back of all this activity the quiet to observe Portia 
and Rosalind and Beatrice going the primrose path 
of dalliance ; he was a friend and lover, concentrated 
and passionate to the point of giving the ultimate 
and unsurpassable expression to human love in the 
Sonnets, and yet had that child-like peacefulness 
and confidence which, in idle moments, become the 
familiar of Puck, Queen Mab, and Ariel: he con- 
ducted a small lawsuit, saved money, bought a 
country house, and made himself a landed pro- 
prietor, while in the still watches his heart bled 
over the grief -stricken will-paralysis of Hamlet, or 
wandered at night through the raging storms with 
the mad old King. We look on and wonder how 
Shakespeare could see and know the whole world of 
thought and feeling. By some strange and for- 
i6 241 



THE HUMAN WAY 



tuitous combination of circumstances he was able 
to draw on the whole self. We all have Midsummer 
Night's Dreams and Macheihs latent in us ; if we 
had not, we should not so thrill with delight when 
we find them, but our whole self is inaccessible. 
The beauty of Shakespeare is, if our picture of him 
is true, that it was not only in the moments of 
secrecy and silence that the whole self visited him. 
He seems to have been eminently good company 
at the Mermaid. He seems to have taken himself 
so casually that none of his contemporaries felt his 
miraculous superiority; so unself conscious was he 
that he seems never to have attempted to rival the 
pompous Ben Jonson. Every now and then ap- 
pears a complete human being on the stage of life 
to remind men, probably, of what a whole humanity 
might be: Shakespeare in the sixteenth century, 
and in the thirteenth St. Francis, that blithe and 
exquisite spirit, living at one with his brothers and 
sisters the sun and the wind, the moon and the 
stars, with an equal love for his little sisters the 
birds, who listened to him preach, and the ravag- 
ing wolf of Gubbio, who could not resist the ad- 
vance of so much beneficence and tenderness, and 
'' when he was bid, came gently as a lamb and lay 
down at the feet of St. Francis.*' Thus it was evi- 
dent that *' the whole frame of the world was obedi- 

242 



THE UNFATHOMABLE REGION 

ent unto the consecrated senses of the holy man/' 
There was no secret of joy hidden from him who 
knew that no earthly grief, wrath, insult, or buf- 
feting could overcome him who possessed himself, 
and who had learned to suffer all things with pa- 
tience and with gladness because beyond all tem- 
poral actions and sufferings he had united himself 
with the smiling beneficence of universal life. 

Indeed, we have an unfathomable, inexhaustible 
region into which we may drop if we will, when we 
are brave enough to turn away a little from the 
eager life of eating, drinking, loving, rejoicing, 
weeping, attempting to make ourselves secure in 
this transient home which shall so surely and so 
shortly be disintegrated and dissolved. 

We house ourselves, for a brief time, on an earth 
which is wheeling through infinite spaces, where 
three-fourths of its surface is formed of devouring 
waves fatal to man, where mountains vomit up 
burning fire, and the winds drop pestilence as they 
blow. Beyond our dwelling, out in the vague blue 
spaces, numberless heavenly bodies turn, endlessly 
shifting positions. An embryo world is flung out 
from a nebula and across the sky anothei is con- 
densed into a twirling ball of flame and sent spin- 
ning through the universe ; moons and planets are 
making and breaking again; space is dotted with 

243 



THE HUMAN WAY 



flying meteors and shooting stars; planets cross 
and recross in the great maze of the cosmic dance. 
The tired moons, cold and weary, drop away into 
stars and are reabsorbed, and frozen suns jostle 
against one another and melt into vapour, while the 
blow generates a new heat, and new worlds emerge 
and flit along the aeonic course. Even in the little 
attic where the reader sits juggling with words as 
his toys, the drama is repeated in little; a ray of 
sun beating through the dormer-window picks up 
the motes of dust and sets them whirling into a 
miniature dance of the worlds, and the eyes that 
gaze and note and wonder are themselves but 
glued-together atoms which shall shortly be broken 
and scattered dust, floating along at the winds' will 
or set a-capering by the heat. 

The mysteries of life are all about us; whoever 
is not deafened by the clamour of life and blinded 
by its shifting sights, recognises them and knows 
what a pitiful fragment is this life of the body. 
The body and its life remind me of a tiny insect 
that crossed my page just now. It looked like a 
grain of yellow sand fitted with six agile legs, and 
it hastened diagonally across the printed page with 
all the air of making the shortest cut to an appoint- 
ment where business was to be transacted. It 
seemed innocent and busy and self-im^portant, but 

244 



THE UNREALITY OF DEATH 

the reader, desiring to distinguish an 5 from an e 
set his thumb on the little creature, and in the 
place of the errand and the activity, the egoistic 
business and liveliness, there was only a faint brown 
smudge on the page which the reader turned. The 
microscopic speck of life was sacrificed to a higher 
cause, and the reader, at any rate, was peacefully 
unaware of causing disaster or mourning by the 
impatient assassination. 

In not unlike manner, the other day, some hun- 
dred thousand human beings were swept out of 
existence by one of nature's cataclysmic outbursts. 
On a larger scale, disaster, falling so suddenly upon 
men like ourselves, brings home to us the vast, 
embracing metamorphosis that goes on continu- 
ously in the universe. One day these men were all 
alive and eager in their transient homes, and the 
next day dissolution clothed a barren chaos where 
they had been. 

But in the midst of wheeling suns and planets, in 
a universe where man is apparently so slight an 
atom that he may be destroyed by the hundred 
thousand, what is it that stands firm and looks 
on unaffrighted, trusting, hoping, believing? Man 
hears the turmoil, sees the tragedies, offers his sym- 
pathies, works his remedies and moves on, over 
it all, still pursuing his ends, eager, zealous, un- 

245 



THE HUMAN WAY 



affrighted, doing what lies at his hand to do, learn- 
ing what he can, valiantly ignoring his helplessness, 
and to the last cheerfully gazing out into that great 
domain that lies beyond his conceptive powers. 

How little care nature has for the stability of 
bodies! It makes and unmakes; it builds up and 
destroys ; it shifts its lines ; the sea makes in upon 
the land and eats the coast ; the wind-blown sands 
heap themselves up into hills and tumble down 
upon the tree-tops, and the living forest is turned 
into coal-mines. The methods of nature are all 
methods of endless change. And yet Emerson 
says: *' All loss, all pain is particular; the universe 
remains to the heart unhurt." Over the scenes of 
death and desolation, above the pain of physical 
suffering, of mortal loss and broken lives, the sun 
goes smiling across the sky in a universe **to the 
heart unhurt." Whatever disasters seem to the 
finite eye, they are as tiny incidents in the course 
of the world's life. 

" But here comes my mistress, the Soul. 
The Soul: 
Forever and forever — longer than soil is brown and 

solid — 
Longer than water ebbs and flows/* 

This thought and this one only consoles man in 
the face of the futility of bodily life. In each body 

246 



''MY MISTRESS, THE SOUL'' 

there dwells something not all confined; whose 
fate is divorced from the body's fate; something 
that any moment may step outside and take a 
wider view, may foresee the calm and upbuilding 
that follow disaster and calamity, aye, can foresee 
and set to work at it, can imagine the extension 
beyond embodiment: 

*' Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am." 

Let any man ask himself if all that he is goes 
down to breakfast and reads the morning paper; 
or if all that he is drops to sleep weary and outdone 
by the day's frettings and fumings. Let any man 
ask himself if all the acts and the words of his life 
were gathered together in a shovel and presented, 
would he be willing to call them all that he is? 
When the corpse of our dead friend lies in the room 
with us we have all these things, his face and his 
hands, his length and breadth, his echoing words 
and treasured deeds, and yet we say our friend is 
gone, and this that remains is fit only to be 

"Rolled round in earth's diurnal covirse 
With rocks and stones and trees." 

How difficult it is in our daily struggles with 
matter, our rearing and training and teaching the 
body to do its work, to remember its reality, its 

247 



THE HUMAN WAY 



inspirer! x^nd yet, herein is all life. Life is not 
in the body, nor in the house, nor in the world, 
except as the soul flows through them, and the fate 
of the soul is divorced from these things ; it neither 
begins nor ends with them; it merely flows through, 
coaxing matter into momentary life and efficiency, 
and passing out in due time to further eternal 
works— 

"Who knows if life be not death and death life?'* 

''For I think,'' says Socrates, ''that we are very 
likely dead ; and I have heard a wise man say that 
at this very moment we are dead and that the 
body is a tomb/' 

One thing, too, becomes more and more certain 
as the history of the world rolls up and we read 
it. Only those can bear life who by some means 
keep ahve a knowledge of the soul; only those 
live life triumphantly and courageously who by 
some means keep up communication between the 
temporal mind and the soul. The means are 
varied. Socrates' s way was one, and Whitman's 
another. St. Francis found the perfect way; and 
yet in lesser degree, with fainter beauty, Luther 
and Knox and Savonarola, St. John of the Cross 
and St. Catherine, and hundreds of thousands of 
men and women to-day know and speak to their 

248 



KING OF THE ADVENTURE 

souls: ''Because, having looked at the objects of 
the universe, I find there is no one, not any par- 
ticle of one, but has reference to the soul/' 

Surely these ''objects of the universe'' at which 
Whitman looked have little respect for the body, 
born and wiped out in a day, passing and repassing ; 
floating by us in varying shapes like waves of 
cigarette smoke, in cloudy rings of vapour that ex- 
pand and melt into nothing. But the soul is very 
lonely; it will not speak where there is noise; nor 
will it let itself be made known where many are 
gathered together; and whoever will be a king in 
this adventure of life, must somehow learn to dis- 
cern the soul that smiles beyond and "to the heart 
unhurt" by the flowing instability of matter; he 
must enter the cell of self-knowledge, holding by 
the greater part and listening to the voice of the 
silence, if he would become what all men owe it to 
themselves to be, one whom "destiny may not 
surprise nor death dismay." 



IX 
MEMORAT MEMORIA 

THERE is a certain short story by Mr. Henry 
James, striking because its every word is in- 
evitable, and its form so married to its meaning 
that the whole has the unity of a fine strain of 
music heard through a quiet summer twilight, in 
which the first sentence introduces us to a hero 
who has *'a mortal dislike of lean anniversaries.'' 
This ever recurrent anniversary, shorn of its one- 
time fulness of meaning, is a ghost we all con- 
sciously or unconsciously shun. The complexity 
of our daily life, the thousand and one small ac- 
tivities that claim the passing moment, concur in 
deadening the feeling for the past, and in hurrying 
us on, occupied only with the immediate moment. 
The whole trend of modern life emphasises the 
value of holding the consciousness steadily con- 
centrated on the issues of the moment. But if 
we would add a touch of the poet and the seer to 
the modern man of action, we must remember that 

250 



THE ALTAR OFTHEDEAD 

dreams and memories and reflections are all a part 
of any real life. As for those people who live their 
whole lives at the top of their voices, they are 
likely to be forgot as soon as the silver cord is 
loosed and the pitcher broken at the well, and their 
places know them no more. But still men will turn 
back to re-read and ponder the meditations of such 
as Marcus Aurelius, who indeed lived in battle and 
commotion, but whose life was deepened and made 
real by recording through the still night watches 
the gratitude that he owed his governors, his tutors 
and his relatives ; or by weighing, as he sat in silence 
at a camp fire, the worth of events and setting 
down the relation of opinion to reality. 

Surely some sort of anniversary, some mark at 
regular intervals on the blank expanse of life, serves 
to blaze a trail, to mark a continuous passage in 
which the past is a part of the present. These 
points of pause in time are moments when the 
ghosts of the past come round us thick and fast, 
and happy is he to whom they **bend down and 
smile." A year, perhaps, has slipped by us, and 
we stand, as we have stood before, remembering, 
regretting, hoping, demanding, questioning. A 
year and a year and many and many years have 
slid away, and when we paused we found life much 
the same, though the elements in it shift position. 

251 



THE HUMAN WAY 



Things and people appeared and vanished, and new 
ones filled their places. There were friends we 
swore should outlast a lifetime; but some of them 
died and the impress of their lives upon ours waxed 
faint; and some forgot us and lived beyond our 
reach or call ; and others we forgot and left behind 
us on the road. And our plans and undertakings, 
too, succumbed to Destiny. Some were unworthy 
and we dropped them ; and some we accomplished 
and so forgot; and some met with a forbidding 
Destiny, and were denied and we dropped them 
there; and some part of us went on living, and 
some part of us died. For we live under inexorable 
law, and law cuts off and builds up without asking 
leave. Life fleets past us, weaving its own great 
cosmic pattern which we never grow large enough 
to see ; and the corner of the picture where we play 
is made of things good and things evil. There are 
honour and justice and fair intent, and close beside 
thrive cheating and misery and agony and maligni- 
ty. There are pauses of rich harmony close against 
shrieking discords, and there are garish colours 
and cool stretches of twilit gray, and the flood of 
the noontide sun and the black shadows of night 
and death. And all these are composed for an in- 
stant like a picture, and then dissolve and vanish, 
^,nd a new arrangement of like factors is before us, 

252 



A POINT IN TIME 



Standing to look back upon the years, how like 
we find life is to the toy kaleidoscope we played 
with as children. We held it to the eye, and made 
out a beautiful, multi-coloured, geometrical pat- 
tern, and just as we began to count the colours, to 
note the form, a tremble of the hand, a tilt of the 
arm, or a vibration in the room, and the pattern 
fell to pieces, and it all dissolved, and the bits of 
coloured glass fell into a new combination. And so 
we face the kaleidoscopic play of Life, and wonder 
if out of the phantasmal mystery there is a thing 
a man may save from the recurrent dissolution. 

At any rate, man dots the limitless web that 
covers him in this dream-like day of life by remind- 
ing himself of memory: memorat memoria. He 
prolongs the visions of the dreams that pass in his 
heart ; he gives continuity to the swift happenings 
and changes ; he peers into the past, and, unbaffied 
by the dusk and secrecies ahead, he strains his eyes 
to see the future. He draws rules of wisdom from 
the fading and renewing of the fluctuous universe. 
He lays hold upon the piety of remembrance, and 
prolongs human relations past death and above 
discord ; he meets calamity with high courage, and 
robs it of half its venom; he directs his deeds so 
that he may draw as much as possible the in- 
evitable ills upon his own head and spare another's; 

253 



THE HUMAN WAY 



and he makes a religion out of the chances of 
posterity, and deals with the worid for the sake of 
those whom he shall never set eyes upon. He 
recites to himself a strange, paradoxical creed: 

"Learn to water joy with tears, 
Learn from fears to vanquish fears; 
To hope, for thou dar'st not despair: 
Exult for that thou dar'st not grieve; 
Plough thou the rock until it bear; 
Know, for thou else canst not believe; 
Lose, that the lost thou mayst receive; 
Die, for none other way canst live/* 

And above all, man looks out beyond his own wing- 
less mortality into the regions of the whirling 
heavens, and watches innumerable suns speed on 
eternal ways, and he says: ''I, too, am there; I, 
too, play a part in the wheeling of the stars through 
their orbits,'* and from the thought he draws in 
peace to his soul, knowing, despite the smallness 
of his part in the great scheme, that he cannot even 
so much as pluck a flower but the movement will 
reach into the farthest, starriest way, and cause a 
sun to tremble in its course. So his life, small, 
changing, lasting for a breath and fading from 
sight, is yet a part of this matter he names eternal 
life, and he identifies his momentary breath with 
all that is immortal. 

254 



A PARADOX 



Yes; there are moments in the lives of all of us 
when with closed eyes we hear, through the silence, 
the pulsing away of the hours and realise the life 
beyond time. The smallness of the present mo- 
ment, made up, as it is, half of past and half of 
future, its whole illusory nature, ''so helpless a 
kitten in the star-spangled universal bag,'' springs 
upon one, and the calendar upon which we mark 
out our sense of succession is a futile blank. Birth 
itself is *' a sleep and a forgetting.'* Then we know 
it is not time but content that counts. The one 
great birthday of the world commemorates a short 
life, not so much as half the allotted span of man; 
a life obscure except for a few short years of ardu- 
ous service and of suffering. It is only humanly 
speaking that we tell of growth in time; growth is 
in life, in fulness of consciousness, in abundance of 
giving. '* The transient," said Martineau, *' is more 
to the large soul than the everlasting to the little." 

But we cannot think in terms of the eternal; 
even as in olden myths the gods appeared to mor- 
tals only in disguise, so the life everlasting, pitiful 
of mortals, presents itself to the dawning conscious- 
ness under the symbols of time and space. We 
live in illusion of beginnings and ends. 

Yet a whole series of anniversaries presents diffi- 
culty. A mortal cannot strike twelve every hour. 

2SS 



THE HUMAN WAY 



Even to attempt to realise life, death, human re- 
sponsibility, all the time, rouses the ghost we shun 
— ^the lean anniversary. We run the risk of meet- 
ing the blatant outward and visible sign from which 
the inward and spiritual grace is all squeezed out; 
we see the empty symbol, and what it once stood 
for is dead and forgotten or never really existed. 
Once we had believed in the efficacy of our wor- 
ship and yet when we turned back to it, it was a 
ghost — a thing we had chosen for a moment or 
with some partial momentary phase of our being, 
and when its anniversary came, the whole self, the 
collected and the recollected self, found it wanting. 
There was no vitality, no staying power. We learn 
to practise care in choosing, by turning back to 
set the stamp of a new value on that we longed 
for, strove after and grasped. The false will 
dwindle and the true will grow. By the law of the 
integrity of the world, the past reshapes itself in 
the silence, and the same happening grows as we 
grow, and begets new powers, new meanings. We 
relate it more closely to ourselves and the universe 
by a recurrent meditation and remembrance. And 
these are the offices of piety; that piety of which 
some one said, it is pity in action ; the considerate 
tenderness toward the imperfect aspects of life, 
toward our own capacities in their incompleteness 

256 



THE CHURCH'S FESTIVALS 

and feebleness, as well as toward all who hurt, 
grieve or injure us. It is the pity that teaches us 
forbearance and tolerance toward ourselves and 
others, and helps us to go softly all our days. 

Even as the Church set once the great system 
of anniversaries, calling the soul from hour to hour 
to stand reverently in the presence of the great 
Model, so in the private life, if it is to have any 
significance or actuality from end to end, we must 
make our fixed points in the flux of things. We 
must choose a moment here and there when we 
shall lay aside the bondage of routine and hold the 
festival of the affections, giving time to do honour 
to some past moment of vital blessedness or some 
faint hope of infinitely sacred import. 

The more wonderful we make a ritual of remem- 
brance, the better. With Stransome, Mr. James's 
hero of faithful memory, the symbol was a wonder- 
ful altar with candles, great and small, each one of 
which stood to him^ for a piteous and pious recol- 
lection of those beloved whom he had lost from 
sight and whose places the rushing world was filling 
as swiftly as it might. To an outsider the altar 
might seem but one rich blaze of light, but Stran- 
some knew each little flame individually, ''as a 
good shepherd knows his huddled sheep''; to him 
each one stood for some pious gratitude, some recol- 

17 257 



THE HUMAN WAY 



lection, some tenderness for a past he would not 
let die. 

The individual who keeps his anniversary is apt 
to celebrate it in silence and in solitude — a night 
alone under the sky, a forsaken cathedral, an or- 
chestral concert where one is lost in the crowd, or 
a day on a mountain top — ^these serve best to burn 
into our deeper consciousness the present life of 
our past. And there is no man without his anni- 
versary, the point or fact in life which seems to 
him beautiful enough to keep through a lifetime 
and if possible into the dream beyond; and his 
past grows richer as his present invests it with 
sanctity, for the truth of things is as much in 
memory, in that which is done and but for our 
piety would be dead, as in the active, present 
moment. 

The Church wisely divided the entire year into 
seasons of recollection. Not a holy-day, not a 
turning-point, but had its fitting offices to recall 
the soul to noble and exalted memories. Certain 
seasons in themselves lead even the least reflective 
of the sons of earth tentatively to make his little 
punctuation marks on the page of time. Christ- 
mas Eve and Christmas morning, the last twilight 
of the year and the midnight when the New Year's 
birth is rung in; who is there that at such moments 

258 



FESTIVALS OF MEMORY 



shall escape, for a few seconds at any rate, meeting 
his double? Who shall avoid holding converse 
with that other self who has been slowly taking 
notes of the thoughts and impressions along the 
way — ^the loves, the hatreds, the good things and 
the evil — and who is there but must give account 
of himself to the self that has stood aside and 
watched the buying and selling, the losses and 
gains, the rejoicing and weeping, unmoved per- 
haps, but inexorably registering judgments. 

It is almost a pity that the two great festivals of 
memory fall so close together that it is hard to give 
to each the emphasis due to such grave matters 
as remembering and forecasting. The main cur- 
rent of life as it flows must be lived in the moment 
— a. thing no sooner named as existent than it is 
gone — ^in the moment, with its tasks, its obligations, 
its pleasures, its impluses. Only looking back- 
ward, do we choose among those fleeting moments 
the better ones, those with which our whole nature 
has more fully concurred, and set them aside for a 
deliberate re-creation in the doubled life of mem- 
ory. All flows by with the current, while we make 
our stand, setting our hand and brain indeed to the 
next clamouring necessity, but when the moment 
of deliberately chosen leisure comes unfolding again 
from the wrappings of memory the great instant, 

259 



THE HUMAN WAY 



the worthy hour^ to re-live them with all their rela- 
tions and connections. 

For the mature, the great festival of memory is 
the last night of the year; the hour of farewells, 
and of taking deep thought for the great stretch of 
the past. Then, if by happy chance, we sit alone 
before our fire, we almost hear the quick ticking 
of moments slipping past, as the flames click, con- 
suming the charred logs, and into the soft twilit 
gloom the ghosts of the past troop and fill the 
empty seats, facing us with earnest faces, bringing 
back all the sense of the flown years, making it all 
alive and present again; setting the values of re- 
flection upon the deeds done and the dreams fore- 
gone; giving us a foretaste of that moment when 
we shall see at a glance the whole lifetime in its 
essential character and real nature; setting for an 
instant the separate incidents of life in their places 
as a part of the whole ; showing the present, in its 
solidarity, the outcome of the past; limiting the 
halting gesture which beckons events from out the 
future. This is the truest happiness of life: with- 
out prejudice or partisanship to inquire into the 
true nature of things and then to act nobly upon 
that knowledge. And such inquiry shows a man 
to himself as a social factor, as a being infinitely 
related to living men, men past and men to come, 

260 



THE CLOSE OF THE YEAR 

to all of whom he owes the natural piety of re- 
membrance and forethought. 

'' And did you think it possible/' said Socrates to 
Critobulus, ''for a bad person to attach to himself 
good men?" And when Critobulus asked him con- 
cerning those certain incantations and potions 
whereby magically a man should win hearts and 
multiply the chief blessing of life, friends and 
lovers, Socrates could only tell him that he had 
never yet seen good slaves sold nor good friends 
abandoned. For the bad can never harmonise in 
friendship with the good, nor can any two stand 
very close to each other without hurt unless the 
ideal stands between them. In that wonderful 
dissertation upon the value of friendship which 
Xenophon chronicles, we see how Socrates forecast 
the consciousness of the century in which we live, 
that no possessions, no distinctions, no wealth, nor 
successes, nor crowns, nor fame can weigh in the 
balance against the love of our kindred and the 
faith of our friends. 

And as the year closes, he is most blessed who 
faces the shadows that troop up from his past with 
no record of pain given, of hopes denied, of ex- 
pectations unmet. For the great question of life 
is whether we add to the sum of its pain and its 
doubt, or to the sum of its joys and its certitudes, 

261 



THE HUMAN WAY 



Who has seen from the beginning each human 
relation as a matter for personal piety can face the 
past and the future without fear, knowing, as the 
great sage knew so long ago, that out of the whole 
universe no real evil can befall a good man. 

The New Year rouses the will and sets us to fore- 
casting. We realise that life is no finished product 
presented to us from the outside. On the contrary, 
it is a fluid set of circumstances into which we walk 
with full power to push, or shove, or solidify, or 
freeze, or boil according to will. To begin to will, 
then, as soon as we take stock of surrounding cir- 
cumstances, is the main interest of beginning a 
New Year. If we set ourselves to operating upon 
circumstances without a definite plan of action, 
without quite knowing if it is boiling or freezing 
we intend to do, we are apt to make but little 
progress. 

But even for the man who has frozen what he 
meant to boil, there is still a hope ahead. Cir- 
cumstances are so fluid, so willing to be dealt with, 
that all he has to do is to apply a greater amount 
of heat to his lump of ice to reach ultimately the 
boiling point. 

To will, then, is what we are to set about in this 
space of life we call the world. We are ourselves 
compact of past wills, tendencies, impulses handed 

^63 



NEW YEAR 



down from generation to generation, but over and 
above these inherited tendencies there is ever 
something more, something individual — namely, 
the turn which this particular combination of ten- 
dencies takes, its will, its desire, its personal effort 
which is to awaken and act upon circumstances. 
For each man, though he be ''the result of the 
selection and the chiselling of thousands of minds 
through the centuries,'' is yet a new power, a new 
combination, a fresh brain full of new seeds of 
thought; alive with desires and intentions which, 
liberated, shall add their quota to the unfolding 
drama of human consciousness. 

A New Year is a likely moment to pause and take 
stock of our outfit and consult our will, because 
any definite point upon which we can make a deeper 
impression than the habitual one is useful as a 
reminder, as a line, a mark in empty space to 
which we can tack on our further actions. It is 
a start from which we can get a sense of logical 
continuity. And so the New Year is a good point 
from which to look backward and forward, a cor- 
ner-stone in the palace of life. If we dislike the 
material with which we have built, if we find the 
tendencies and impulses which have been handed 
down to us are, on the whole, rather poor and futile 
stuff, we need not waste time lamenting the poor 

263 



THE HUMAN WAY 



foundations of our forebears; but we can set in- 
dustriously about the business of restraint or rein- 
forcement. One thing is certain : no one can afford 
to go out of life without leaving some visible tracks 
of his passing for those who follow after. It is 
wholesome, from time to time, to take into account 
the second point in creation, and instead of dwell- 
ing on the fact that life was created in seven days 
and presented to man complete and perfect, to 
remember that if ever there was an Eden it was 
forfeited, and man was driven out to recreate a 
life for those who should follow him. And it is 
this task we still have in hand. Consciously or un- 
consciously, for good or for evil, by hook or by 
crook, with careful choices and vigorous willing, 
or by slothful carelessness and feeble drifting, we 
are creating life for the generations to come — life 
and its values and its possibilities, its joys and its 
griefs, its health and its sickness. The past is past, 
and what is created is created, but the world is 
still in embryo. Each man has his little plot to 
cultivate, and he can still weed and plant, and 
what is planted spreads and grows of its own will, 
once it gets a fair start. It is not necessary to have 
such a wide plot; an invalid's room, where pain is 
courageously and cheerfully borne, a cabin where 
poverty that forgets itself in work and helpfulness, 

264 



NO CUL-DE-SAC 



the tiniest workshop where beauty and durability 
and honest craftsmanship are loved and fostered, 
is space enough for better life to be built. The real 
beauty of life, after all, is the quality we learn to 
put into things; and any moment is an excellent 
time to decorate dearth with quality. Wherever 
we are, however near the end of our running, it is 
never too late to resolve that high thoughts and 
brave qualities shall accompany us for the rest of 
the journey. Such resolves may be easier for those 
who have made them before and carried them out ; 
they are undoubtedly more difficult for those who 
have made them before and then turned slothful 
and let them slide out of their grasp, but we may 
always bear in mind that beginning again is never 
impossible ; the field of effort is open, and who sets 
his will to work may achieve. 

There is a good deal of writing, nowadays, that 
treats of life as if it were a cul-de-sac; as if man 
were caught here in a blind alley with no outlet; 
but surely, if there is one universally known truth, 
it is that life has beginning and end; as we have 
come in, so also shall we go out, and after we have 
once waked up to our position, measured ourselves, 
and taken our endowment and tendencies into ac- 
count, it is pretty well left in our own hands how we 
shall spend the interval between the coming and going. 

265 



THE HUMAN WAY 



There is a certain play of Ibsen's which seems, 
at a first reading, to be largely an arraignment of 
nature ; all the instincts play false ; the wrong peo- 
ple are coupled together; the wrong influences 
emerge at critical moments from the outside; 
everything is working at cross-purposes; and 
finally the most innocent person in the play, a lit- 
tle lame boy, dies, leaving his parents childless and 
without responsibility; by his going the field is 
cleared for every evil impulse to hold sway, but it 
occurs to the parents in their grief to resolve that 
the child's death shall not go for nothing; all the 
care and the training and the help that they would 
have lavished upon him they decide to give to the 
poor and ignorant children of the village; and as, 
wherever will awakens, blind instinct halts, the 
play closes with the slow dawn of redemption 
breaking in the distance. 

Sin and suffering, mistakes and wrong-doing may 
be blocks to lay the foundations of a new building. 
Are we bereft? There is always some one lonelier 
upon whom we may lavish care. Are we poor? 
We are, all of us, marching the direct road to 
death; and whatever death may or may not be, 
it is, at any rate, divested of creature comforts 
and sensuous things, and poverty is good discipline 
and preparation for their ultimate loss. Have we 

266 



CHRIST'S BIRTHDAY 



reached the further mile-stones of old age, to find 
the way behind us empty and ugly ? Have we be- 
gun to feel the shackles of the past, and to think 
that what we have been we are, and that new ad- 
ventures are but futile dreams? But who wills, 
may keep the flame of hope alive, and the little 
sparks of interest kindled. To fan alive the flame, 
to blow it into a glow, to keep it burning for our 
warmth and others', and to go down to death, 
knowing that whatever was worth while in this 
life has in it the seed of everlasting life, is to have 
lived successfully, and one may begin to do this at 
any odd turning in the way. Any New Year will 
do for a beginning. Life is always plastic ; it waits 
for the mould we offer it, and whatever point in 
time we may have reached, we are free to will the 
vessel into which life flows, of noble outline and 
generous purpose. 

And to this end, Christmas, with its joy and its 
celebration of infancy and our relation to other 
men, is the chief reminder. The very greeting of 
Christmas Day brings a fact into Christian worship, 
lacking which, it would seem incomplete; the 
thought of worship being compatible with innocent 
merriment, with the blithe self -expansion of a joy- 
ful soul in people upon whom some all-subduing 
experience had wrought heroically. The Church 

267 



THE HUMAN WAY 



has seasons for introspection, as in Lent, when the 
eye is turned inward upon our own impotence and 
frailty; it has seasons for solemn rejoicing after 
grief, as at Easter and at Whitsuntide, when the 
eye is fixed upon the victory over death and the 
grave; and in midwinter, amidst the suspended 
life of nature, we commemorate the birth of an 
Infant and our thoughts are turned toward our 
fellow-man and toward all young and joyous life. 
It is particularly exquisite that in view of the awe- 
some thoughts inspired by our great Model — ^the 
short years of arduous service, the lonely walking 
amidst a fallen humanity, hostile and cunning. His 
betrayal ripening in the closest circle. His dearest 
incapable of loyalty at the awful end — ^that the 
beginning of the career should have been surround- 
ed by such purely blithe and joyous symbolism. 
In the middle of the night when shepherds were 
guarding their flocks, the star led the way and the 
wise men followed, bearing gifts, with worship and 
exaltation in their hearts. The angels bending 
from the sky carolled aloud that a new order of 
life was beginning upon earth, while a watching 
mother in a manger rested in an ecstasy of bliss. 
This new order of peace and good- will to men could 
not have been ushered upon earth under circum- 
stances more joyous. 

?68 



THE POWER OF AN IDEA 

The shepherds watching, must have seen Orion 
stalking across the sky, with Sirius and Procion 
and the group of the Pleiades, like a jewelled casket 
gleaming above, and have known that special kind 
of peace that falls upon the heart that w^akes and 
watches under the stars when the fret and fuss of 
the day with its endless activity is over, and the 
infinitely distanced stars wheel serenely on their 
courses in the stillness and the hush of the night. 
So perfect is the short account in St. Luke of the 
coming of humanity's King, that about it clusters 
not only the entire history of what is holy in life, 
but all aspiration, too, for what is beautiful. The 
history of architecture, painting, sculpture, music 
and poetry, took new impetus and their further 
development is all intimately wrapped up in this 
coming of the new idea. For here was a human 
Being who from the first protested against the order 
of this world, who lived and reigned in a kingdom 
purely spiritual, stretching beyond time; who re- 
nounced utterly all self -fulfilment and emphasised 
that what man had feared as death was really en- 
trance into life. This was man's apprehension of 
the fact that the life was more than the meat, that 
the life of the spirit transcended the life of the body; 
that fulfilment of the demands of the body was 
death, and the only true life was listening to the 

269 



THE HUMAN WAY 



claims of the spirit. It was a complete reversal 
of the creed that men had lived in up to that time. 
It was pointing out what Socrates was trying to 
show men in Greece a few centuries earlier, that 
we must not listen to the claims of the partial self, 
the immediate short-sighted demand, but to the 
claims of the whole self that stretches beyond space 
and time. This is a hard lesson. Indeed, it is the 
lesson of human life, and it is truly well that we 
commemorate the incarnation of the Word in sor- 
row and in penitence, in awe and in reverence, in 
blitheness and in merriment. We were more than 
men if we did not fall short of understanding the 
new gospel, which contradicts the seeming and il- 
lusory life of the body; but we have a festival 
when men agree to emphasise the doctrine that 
what we give we have, that it is more blessed to 
die than to live, that we are not to take thought for 
the morrow, since in losing life we find it. Then 
we emphasise the truth that we bear half-hidden 
through the year, that we are, inasmuch as we are 
to other men. We are melting the separate exist- 
ence till it lose itself in the general life. The ful- 
ness of consciousness sweeps out beyond ourselves, 
our house, our friendships, and on these few days 
we learn a little to love humanity entire. We bind 
closer our relations to all that we have seen and 

270 



THE CULMINATION 



heard, and our good-will stretches over the earth. 
Humanity wakes on its birthday morn and makes 
claim not to gain but to give ; not to be loved but 
to love; not to live in but to lose the self. This 
is the culmination of human life, to lay it aside. 
This is a fixed ideal that we hold aloft to human 
nature, and as far as in us lies, we try to realise 
and celebrate it. We have had the vision of the 
perfect human life. And let life come as it will, 
to the throne or a manger, it comes to grow into 
this wisdom, to serve, unafraid and in all diligence, 
the Will not its own, and to offer up its life for 
others as best it may. 

Around the earth people join in this celebration 
of the birth of a Child and gladness spans the girth 
of the world, as for nineteen hundred years it has 
touched the hearts of the chosen. Doubtless the 
primitive Christians who could face death with 
triumph of faith and rejoicing bore the gladness 
of this birth more constantly at heart than could 
be done later. For time wears away the intensity 
of realisation, and we know the story so well now, 
that we are less apt to take it vitally. It is so much 
a part of our actual living that we set a day apart 
to think over the blessedness of it, to realise how 
the message of the spiritual ideal has permeated 
all life and ameliorated all conditions. 

271 



THE HUMAN WAY 



The power of the idea is ever wonderful. How 
many millions of people are happy on a given day 
now because of a thought — and a thought that 
came into being so many centuries ago. We scoff 
at ideas often and speak as if the only powerful 
thing were a concrete object, but when did a con- 
crete object ever sway the mass of humanity for 
two thousand years? Whatever is of the body is 
temporary, an illusion, a show, and passes away, 
but whatever is of the spirit continues forever. 
And this festival of joy is the new birth of the 
spirit into the world, and it grows year by year, 
century by century, into a wider, a fuller, a blither 
and a truer festival of peace. 

Joy always presupposes sorrow. There must 
once have been a time in the world when sadness 
was a less dangerous matter than it is to-day, or 
the great teachers would hardly have dared in- 
culcate it as a necessary practice. St. Bonaven- 
tura, in his Golden Ladder of Virtues, admonishes 
men climbing toward perfection to afflict them- 
selves profoundly over the sufferings of their 
friends, over the sufferings of their enemies, over 
the outrages offered to the glory of God ; to suffer 
with those who in health undergo affliction, and 
those who, being dead, still undergo affliction; to 
suffer with those who suffer from their own weak- 

272 



THE LADDER OF VIRTUES 

ness, and with those who, being brave, are yet 
killed upon the high mountains, and with those 
who do not even know what things make for their 
peace; to suffer over all corporal ills, all spiritual 
ills, all spiritual weaknesses, all temporal and 
transient pains, all prolonged pains, and all eternal 
pains, and then, as if that were not enough, higher 
up on the ladder of virtues he begins again warning 
us to repent and to afflict ourselves over all mortal 
sins, all grave venial sins, all slight venial sins, all 
sins of act, of word, of deed; all sins of evil com- 
mitted, of good omitted; all sins of lassitude, 
ennui and tepidity; for personal sins, for sins one 
has occasioned knowingly, and sins one has un- 
knowingly caused others to commit, to regret, and 
bitterly, manifest sins, hidden sins, and the very 
sin of being human and unjustified in the light 
of supreme perfection; the wrongs one has done 
to one's self , the wrongs one has done the community, 
the wrongs one has done to God ; and then he adds, 
'' reveal the pain of the soul by the avowal of the 
lips, by tears in the eye, and by the mortification 
of the flesh/' Indeed, when one reaches the last 
rung of the ladder but one, one still meets fifteen 
modes of pain to be borne before one reaches the 
highest round of virtue and can afford to be joyful. 
Even the most strenuous of exhorters to-day 
i8 273 



THE HUMAN WAY 



would hardly dare lead the sheep through so dark 
a valley. It is all too easy to realise the sadness 
and the imperfection of life, the impossibility of 
wholly adapting one's self to environment, of wholly 
meeting the demands of other people. Life offers 
enough involuntary sadness in a world where con- 
ditions are ever fleeting, where no relation is per- 
manent, where struggle for individual satisfaction 
is fruitless and defeat certain, where love of beauty 
and of goodness lays us open to quicker and deeper 
wounds, and where even pursuit of knowledge it- 
self is bafHing and thwarting, since the more we 
learn, the wider becomes the field of the unknown. 

But there are two points to note in the ladder of 
St. Bonaventura: one is that he bids men deplore 
not the inevitable imperfections of circumstance, 
which is the fundamental note of the modern pessi- 
mist, but their own shortcomings; and second, that 
a care-free and joyous existence can only be granted 
to those who have scaled the topmost rung of the 
ladder of virtue. 

It is not the feeling that one has a share in the 
world's imperfection which generates despair, for 
with one's self one can always do something, but if 
one allows one's self to believe that the tragedy of 
existence is inherent in life, and that life is not 
malleable, that do what one will, strain every nerve, 

274 



ST. BONAVENTURA 



and put forth every effort, life is still not plastic 
to endeavour, that it will no more respond to our 
calls than the stars did to the hallooing of Will 
o' the Mill, then we have a sadness which is dan- 
gerous. But affliction over our own shortcomings, 
and a complete list of them to refer to, makes for 
the sadness which lies at the root of effort. Char- 
acter, after all, is never founded upon cushions; 
it is built upon rock-hard renunciations and diffi- 
culties; *'the sharpened life commands its course''; 
such character learns to bear not only inevitable 
ills, but finally, from time to time, to give itself 
a little gratuitous suffering on some one else's 
account. 

True happiness, what little we know of it, is not 
of the nature of merriment or gayety or ease — 
these give nothing better than pleasure — ^but true 
happiness is the outgrowth of peace, and peace has 
firm foundation. It is the result of reflection, grief 
and acceptance, and one begins to understand 
how the great Bonaventura dared so to emphasise 
sorrow to his people. To face one's own imper- 
fections with a zeal to create order in one's little 
corner of the universe is to indulge in those whole- 
some tears that cleanse the vision ; to believe that 
life and the world are radically at fault, and that 
we are helpless, is to invite the most destructive of 

275 



THE HUMAN WAY 



philosophies. And it is for that former wholesome 
sorrow that the season of Lent is set apart. 

Secular as we may become, little inclined as the 
age makes us to deal in the supernatural or the 
miraculous, there remains ever the curious phe- 
nomenon that there has been but one wholly 
triumphant life upon earth. Look where one will 
for examples and for help, one comes back to it 
ever. Only once has it been authoritatively stated, 
''I have overcome the world,'' and from the same 
lips came the command to take up the cross and 
follow after. This, then, is the purpose of a sea- 
son for reflection and solemn thinking, not that we 
should grieve over life as it is, or become impatient 
for the crowning of the days, but that we should 
have a season set apart from light-hearted and care- 
less acceptance of the days to front seriously our 
own part in life, even to the extent of noting the 
three hundred and sixty forms of offence enu- 
merated by St. Bonaventura, and by thus taking 
thought, to add to our spiritual stature. Though 
no man reaches his ideal, or, looking back, feels that 
he has done all that was possible, yet every effort 
in a right direction tends to make for repose. 
Wherever, by meditation and by pause, we have 
learned how to right a wrong or to bear silently 
an irremediable evil, we have thrown a pebble 

276 



FAST-DAYS 



on the cairn that marks the grave of the world's 
grief. 

It would seem that the fast days are particularly 
suited to the knitting up, too, of the infinite rela- 
tion. One fasts that the bodily processes may not 
overheat the brain, but that it may be clear and 
cool for a larger current of thought from outside. 
One fasts in solitude because fasting and solitude 
bring the slow-moving meditation that strips man 
bare of all his warm self -glory, and shows him him- 
self alone in a universe so great that though he 
sees and dimly conceives, he dares not try to think 
of it. Shut in, in the dark which has no boundaries, 
or in a glimmering half-light where he faces some 
symbol of the fuller life — some carven bit of wood, 
picture or text, he begins to know his own insignifi- 
cance, in a boundless universe of life. 

It would be difficult to find a religious system of 
thought which does not make provision for a sea- 
son of self-denial as a means to self-culture. It is 
an old axiom of the Amazulus that *'the stuffed 
body cannot see spiritual things.'' It is Platonic 
philosophy as well as modern common sense, that 
a man who devotes himself to his appetites and his 
ambitions will have mortal thoughts; he will be 
fenced by such ideas as can be contained in a 
limited time and space. A man who nourishes a 

277 



THE HUMAN WAY 



disinterested love of wisdom and pursuit of truth 
cannot fail of immortal and divine ideas. 

But every man is more or less an ascetic. He 
sacrifices one thing to get another, even if it be 
only on the plane of expending labour to buy food 
and clothing; he sacrifices inertia and ease for 
civilisation and prolonged living. Every man 
who has any ideal of any sort begins by cutting 
off something that is incompatible with attainment. 
Asceticism is, in this sense, merely disciplined 
effort to gain an end. In the case of the Lenten 
observance, the fasting is a physical self-denial that 
prepares the mind for a more spiritual joy at Easter. 
It is a truism that joy is great in proportion as it 
has absorbed pain. It is, in its essence, a contrast 
and a reaction. So by renunciation we attain a 
twofold end : we strengthen a habit of self-control 
by giving up something in itself harmless, and we 
prepare ourselves for joy by a self-imposed season 
of sadness. 

It cannot be by chance that the festival of the 
resurrection falls together with the springing of 
the year and the rebirth of the earth. The strange 
fitness of times and events only strikes us now and 
then when we stop to reflect ; but this side of life, 
the beautiful, undulating order of the universe, is 
what gives man his sense of security; it is the root 

278 



EASTER 



of all gayety and the buoyancy with which we tread 
the appointed paths. What! shall the orbit of 
the star be mapped out, and the hip-joint of the 
locust's leg be set so that he can make music through 
the hot and sultry nights, and the blows that fall 
upon the soul of man be meaningless and hap- 
hazard ? 

It is not to detract from the value of a symbol, 
therefore, to realise that it is in its essence of the 
intrinsic nature of the human heart, the result of 
the inevitable preoccupation of man; or that in 
all ages, all climes, he has reacted in some way or 
other against the numbing conclusion of a pos- 
sible ending. In the lowest tribes and the farthest 
days some care was taken to provide the dead with 
solace on the long journey, dark and mysterious, 
upon which they were supposed to go. Who can 
look unmoved to-day upon this relic of a past 
age, in a negro cemetery, and see the toys laid 
about a little child's grave, the photographs and 
favourite possessions about those of the older hu- 
man child, without being touched by this groping 
of the mind into the darkness beyond which it 
cannot yet see clear? In its own way this is a 
reaffirming of the unity of all life; it, too, is a 
realisation that it is the same universal life showing 
a new face. Man himself, myriad-minded, con- 

279 



THE HUMAN WAY 



fused by feeling one thing at one time and a 
wholly new one at another, yet holds ever in some 
dark chamber of his thought the conviction that 
all things are one, and that multiformity is but a 
way of looking, by turns, at the parcelled kingdom 
of the universe. It is as in the child's song of a 
new poet: 

" ' What does it take to make a rose, 
Mother mine?V 
*The God that died to make it, knows, 
It takes the world's eternal wars. 
It takes the moon and all the stars, 
It takes the might of Heaven and Hell, 
And the everlasting Love as well. 
Little Child/ ". 

No atom of dust, no star-burst or trailing comet, 
must fail to the making of the whole perfection 
which is the thinking body of divinity. All the 
snows and the storms, the short, cold winter days, 
go to the making of the sweet and wasteful hours 
of the long twilights. It is just this faint taste and 
premonition in the air of what is to come which 
makes spring the season of deepest gladness; it is 
a foretaste of desultory wanderings through a 
warm-breathing earth when the unexpected visita- 
tions of the best thoughts fall, such thoughts as 
can only deign to come in blessed idleness to the 

280 



THE WHOLE PERFECTION 

passive mind. And who at such a moment, in the 
presence and renewal of all life, could recklessly 
hazard — a doubt of lasting blight ? How often, in 
looking upon Greek vases, we see the flowerlike 
wilted figure of Persephone falling lax in the arms 
of the fiery charioteer Aidoneus. And who can 
forget — who, at any rate, that has ever looked upon 
the keen-eyed pitiless sorrow of the wandering 
Demeter of Cnidus, in the British Museum, can 
forget the grief of the desolate mother, the sterility 
of the earth — ^the sad news handed on by Hecate, who 
heard the ravished maiden's cry, and by Helios, who 
saw the theft ? Then Zeus, taking pity upon the earth, 
sent Iris with a message to Hades, ordering the rede- 
liverance of Persephone to her mother, that the grief 
of death might not be devastating and overpowering. 
So a strange anguish and despair at the glowing 
human life which seemed to suffer sudden eclipse 
in death, and its reaction, has always been be- 
fore the mind of man, until from the annual re- 
birth of the year, he fashioned himself a hope and 
a consolation, assuring himself that even as the 
seed falls into the earth and darkness, to come 
forth in due season in more glorified aspect, so the 
soul of man suffers momentary and partial eclipse 
to be born more gloriously; though alas! not 
within the scope of our vision. 

281 



THE HUMAN WAY 



How intimate and familiar, how strangely mod- 
ern and near, seems the last great fact of resur- 
rection, as we turn to it from the more ancient 
aspects! How sonorous and living are the words 
of the mediaeval ritual : 

"Pic nobis f Maria, quid vidisti in viaf\ 

And the detailed verification of the antiphonal 
chant : 

'^ Sepiilchrum Christi viventis et gloriam vide resurgentis,** 

To know One risen from the dead, to feel the life 
once reaching only a handful of folk on a strip of 
land by the Mediterranean, now filling the world 
and leading men, is to know that as surely as the 
spring follows winter, so surely does life follow 
death, and how little it matters what the form 
of that life be, since at least we know that nothing 
shall be lost. 

These are the thoughts that rise in our hearts as 
we make our little marks in time, to divide off season 
from season. These are what we stay our pace to 
listen to, lest life flit by us unnotched, and too lit- 
tle of its meaning and significance sink into our 
consciousness. For such calling of ourselves to 
account do we set apart days for recollection ; days 

282 



THE DREAM OF A WORLD 

of preparation for what more ample years may 
yet unfold, and once more we tell ourselves to take 
heart, however fleeting the pageant we call life 
may be. 

"For the dream of a world is a dream in dream, 
But the one Is is, or naught could seem/' 



X 

DETACHMENT 

AS we move on through life one of two things 
/v must happen to us: either our courage grows 
more secure, faith in the wisdom and the purposes 
of life increase, or we lose all sense of rationality in 
the universe and the whole of life seems a hideous 
mechanism, whereby we and all others must sooner 
or later be crushed. But if we have steadily builded 
block upon block of faith and hope and love, we 
do find that the work of building up life is not 
done all by our own effort. Other forces have 
joined us. We find that, by dint of living, we have 
learned how to live. 

Yes; however little it may look like happiness, 
age it is and not youth that has come to feel at 
home and at ease upon earth. *' We are born with 
travail and strong crying." We arrive in the 
world protesting against its alien and uncongenial 
climate. We are ready at the lightest breath of 
wind to shuffle off our tiny mortal coil and make 

?84 



THE WAY OF LEARNING 

back to a more fitting atmosphere. For the first 
few years we consent to remain only under most 
careful watching, tending and coaxing. And then 
we catch the mortal disease of hope. We begin 
to live looking forward to that which is not but 
shall be, our birthdays, or Christmas-time, or the 
end of school, or our first ball, or winter or sum- 
mer or spring. Only one thing is sure: we live 
because we hope for what is not and, as the years 
wax old, we learn could never be. 

And yet, during all those years of strife and hope, 
something happens. Silently, secretively, while 
our eyes were turned aside, when we were least 
aware, we were learning to live. By dint of dis- 
appointments and little successes, failures, and sur- 
prises in the .workings of the great machinery of 
life, we were finding our level in the universe and 
adapting ourselves to the human climate. 

Not only do we harden ourselves to the difficulties 
of life, but we find all sorts of new joys springing 
up about the way ; and once we come to fifty years, 
we can take as much joy from the glimpse of a 
duck pond as at twenty we can get from crossing 
the Pacific Ocean. With a half-century of mortal 
years behind us, the sinking of the sun in an aura 
of golden wings gives an intensity of joy that at 
a quarter of a century old the inheritance of mil- 

28s 



THE HUMAN WAY 



lions and the acquisition of fame cannot bequeath. 
Partly growth and adjustment — ^the happy result 
of use and wont — has effected this, but partly, 
too, bit by bit, that clamorous and exacting creat- 
ure we call the self has become torpid with age 
and has gotten a little out of our way. And how 
much easier all life's tasks are, how much more 
reassuring all its solaces, once we are rid of our- 
selves! It sometimes seems as if all we have to do 
is to stand long enough out of our own light to be 
saints and geniuses. But only by the once-born 
can this be accomplished in youth. The rolling 
years alone school the rest of us to let the self 
and its affairs go by while we seek the kingdom of 
God. And all the other things are added to us, 
we hardly know how, without willing of ours, with- 
out striving. The centre of interest has shifted, 
and it is no longer our own hunger and thirst, our 
housing and our garments, our illustriousness and 
our possessions, irksome as these always are, that 
claim our consciousness ; but we have fallen silent- 
ly and amazedly in love with the universal processes 
— ^the shadows on a vine-clad wall, the freshness of 
the air in early morning, the gold haze dropping 
from the sun at noontide, the slant lights of after- 
noon checkering the earth, and the silent and 
regular marshalling of the stars at night; these 

286 



THE SECRET HAPPENING 

appease the spirit when earth has become our 
veritable home where we linger as part and parcel 
of all that goes on there. Poor ignorant youth goes 
about hungry for happenings, longing for accumu- 
lated things. But there is but little life in things 
and events, after all. Life is in the projecting 
spirit, and to sit still and see the wind flutter the 
leaves in a tree-top is happening enough to hold 
the spirit in silent and amazed delight for hours 
together. But the spirit must grow, the self must 
get out of its own light, before we can project into 
the world the real joy of living. 

Do you remember Will o' the Mill, and how he 
cautioned the maiden not to pick the flowers and 
carry them into the house for her own? **It's a 
bit like what I wished to do when I was a boy. 
Because I had a fancy for looking out over the 
plain, I wished to go down there — where I couldn't 
look out over it any longer. Wasn't that fine 
reasoning?" But you remember he did not go, 
nor did he take the maiden, but stayed quietly up 
on his mountain-side, and ''year after year faded 
away into nothing, while down in the cities on the 
plain red revolt sprang up and was suppressed in 
blood; battles were fought; there were christen- 
ings and marryings and parades and deaths," all 
the tumult and the agitation of constant happen- 

287 



THE HUMAN WAY 



ings; but Will knew them all to be but so much 
empty bustle, and real living to be in the quiet spirit. 
And if the learned and aged folk, who have lived 
long and learned much, neither shun nor court 
death, it is because they take it that death will 
look after itself even as life has done, life having 
taught them so much courage and confidence. We 
knew not whence our deepest lessons, our greatest 
blessings, dropped like silent seed into our spirits. 
Surely we may trust the new transference, and wait 
in silent content what revelation it shall bring. 
Since our own hand has done so little in the whole 
matter, our responsibilities were so greatly less im- 
portant than we fancied. 

The evening of life draws toward us with the 
same quieting of the spirit that the day's twilight 
brings. What peace, what soft light comes with 
the close of day, hushing the tumult of our passion- 
ate desires, quieting the spirit and changing the 
very face of sorrow. 

"To me at least was never evening yet 
But seemed far beautifuler than its day, 
For past is past." 

On either edge of night there falls a pause, a halt, 
when neither light nor darkness reigns solely, but 
when upon the twofold face of life the rising gloom 

288 



THE TWILIGHT 



and dropping light are blended. Then there creep 
over the face of the world indistinguishable grada- 
tions of light and shadow, and the precise outlines 
of objects melt and blend in a softened chiaroscuro 
— a fusion of pale tints and invading shadows more 
subtle and more delightful than any masses of bril- 
liant colouring lit by the glare of day. The light 
which lingers in the west and glows reflected in the 
east is met by the upcoming dark that pushes from 
the sod and breathes like slow smoke over the 
growths of earth, and the bright greens and scar- 
lets, blues and golds of day, turn into copper, 
verdigris and lake, saffron and lavender and ashen 
hues, a whole chromatic science of shifting flushes. 
Only the thick and furry leaves retain the bright- 
ness of the day and sound their cheerful notes 
upon the usurping quiet. Surely it cannot be all 
unsymbolical that so often the dropped sun leaves 
behind upon the sky great widespread wings of 
tinted cloud, as though behind the body of the 
life there remained the instruments of further 
flight. How small and softened all human figures 
seem in such twilights; how fit a growth of earth 
all men and animals seem with outlines blurred, 
terminating in gentle spreading shadows, not un- 
like wavering bushes or small trees with roots deep 
sunken into that they spring from. They melt 
19 289 



THE HUMAN WAY 



into the darkness below and behind them as they 
do in certain of the more beautiful of Millet's 
paintings. The chaplet of the hours is told, and 
in the lull distant sounds carry distinctly home; 
the daylight teasing of the cattle bells is sweetened 
by the hour; the soothing gurgle of the fountain 
in the gray court, unnoted all day long, begins to 
sing distinctly, and across the heath and hill the 
call of evening bells tolls out above the last impor- 
tant twittering of the birds before they settle down 
to sleep. 

« And the year, too, has its twilights. Before its 
full life is born and again just as the summer lays 
itself to sleep, we have the double sense of life and 
death, of growth and its pursuing decline. Nor 
is the slow fall of the year like to be all a season 
for lamentation, for is not the promise of rest as 
grateful to the weary as composing the limbs to 
rest at night, shutting out light and sounds and 
slowly drawing the veil of the unconscious over the 
fretted mind? To be sure. Autumn confronts us 
with the truth that something which was, is now 
to be no more; but if a man has lived healthily 
active, played and sown through his springtide, 
and worked and reaped through his summer, why 
should he not welcome the beckoning finger that 
calls in rest? Surely in themselves there is no 

290 



AUTUMN 



harshness in the heaped-up months, the chill wind 
and the falling leaves, the early shadows and the 
mustering birds upon the lawn. The time-worn 
haunting question of the snows of yester-year may 
well have sweetness in its pang, when we reflect 
that the past had its burdens no less than its 
beauties and that '' past is past.'' The golden haze 
Autumn flings across the world, the purple mists 
that clothe the distance, the turf softened by the 
cumbering leaves, 

"Yellow and black and pale and hectic red, 
PcvStilence-stricken multitudes, ' ' 

all have the same beauty that the still-fallen even- 
ing has, or ripened fruit, or a maturity that, having 
fulfilled at the right times the right deeds of life, 
garners its harvest and awaits with calm the deep- 
ening silence. \f 

Although no harvesting is ever quite the ideal 
one, and no backward look sees the summer all one 
glow of success, yet past is past, and in these sea- 
sonable hushes of the mind and pauses of desire 
we often see that grief and failure and deprivation 
have a beauty all their own. The faces of suffering 
and content have each their separate fairness, and 
even a child may sometimes have imprinted on its 
countenance ''a great inherited regret'' which adds 

291 



THE HUMAN WAY 



a spiritual beauty to its youth. A softer light is 
shed on life as we go the downward path, and we 
see with quieter eyes, which meet the last blow 
always with a smile. 

"The day that one is dying, sorrows change 
Into not altogether sorrowlike. 
I do see strangeness but scarce misery, 
Now it is over." 

So judgments change, and our momentary moods 
and reactions are yet no final word upon the in- 
evitable course of life. Indeed, it is when the 
course is nearly run, when we catch breath and 
pause to look back over the winding and perplex- 
ing ways of life, we are most like to discover truth. 
Evening's solemnity and stillness bring forth the 
thickest brood of true thoughts to a quiet mind. 
All the inexplicable shortcomings, the misadven- 
tures, the griefs and torments, come to seem no 
more than flowers that fade, and airs that die, or 
old songs swiftly forgotten. The stillness that has 
fallen and clothed the mind in peace would seem 
to justify all the fervour and the pain, the fire of 
feeling and even its vanity. 

So the soul itself wins often a twilight hour of 
repose or ever the night of death falls on it. A 
period comes when the destructive processes of 

292 



THE SOUL'S TWILIGHT 



grief and anguish cease. Time sinks into eternity 
as shadows melt into night, and in the vastness of 
world-processes the soul lays aside the little dream 
of personal power, knowing well that thought, 
though it sink down to the bottom of the sea, or 
fly to the uttermost coasts of the morning, or soar 
beyond the stars, shall yet win no release except 
through trust and submission. *' Sink down, then, 
into Him, beyond the limits of nature and creat- 
ure, and submit thyself to Him, that He may 
do with thee what He will, for thou art not so 
much as worthy to speak to Him,'' counsels the 
ancient mystic; but the twilight that invades the 
soul in its evening hour already brings submission 
with it and sorrows change, even of their own ac- 
cord. The processes of resignation come from be- 
yond ourselves even as life has come with its 
rhythmic growth and decline, even as in the un- 
known hour the final mystery of death shall come. 
Our sorrows, our tumults come to seem to us but 
the necessary material out of which we have built 
a consciousness ready for a will greater than our 
own. Our griefs and tragedies may be transformed 
into beauty which shall outlive our little day. 
There is a beautiful church, a miraculous example 
of the lasting beauty grief may rear, in the little 
town of Bourg in Savoy. Bourg itself is like many 

293 



THE HUMAN WAY 



other little towns, wrapt in its own desuetude, 
dimly dreaming of a happier past, but at the end 
of a long, straggling street of tiny houses where 
potteries and wooden shoes are made, there stands 
one of the most wonderful churches in all France — 
the church of Brou. It stands high in a field, and 
cuts the distant blue of the Savoy hills with its 
silvery outlines. But its great charm is inside. 
The brightness, the clear light sifting through the 
weather-stained glass of the clerestory, the deli- 
cately ornamented Gothic architecture, and some- 
thing in the adjustment of the proportions that 
gives one a sense of air and space, almost as of a 
large piece of outdoors vaguely enclosed and beau- 
tified, are incomparable. So bright, so lofty is the 
inside that the swallows have builded their nests 
in the rafters, and they whir back and forth 
through the nave, their shrill chirping and chatter 
echoing in the surrounding walls. *'How amiable 
are thy tabernacles, O Lord of Hosts. . . . Yea, the 
sparrow hath built her a house and the swallow a 
nest where she may lay her young, even thine 
altars, O Lord of Hosts, my King and my God!" 

The whole impression is one of gladness and of 
grace; the wealth of adornment, the detail, the 
art, and the care with which the effect is gained, 
justify Pater's comparing it to that early rise of 

294 



A MEMORIAL TO GRIEF 



French poetry which experimented so freely with 
the structure of verse and added so much to the 
moulding of a national language — *' giving it 
lustre," as Du Bellay says. It bears another sem- 
blance to the poetry of the *' Pleiad'' in that it be- 
longed to the outburst of individualism which 
came with the Renaissance. The church of Brou, 
a monument to a great private sorrow, maintains in 
itself the cheeriest of aspects, a beauty which is the 
very embodiment of gaiety and light-heartedness. 
The veins of its sixteen great pillars run in one jet 
from base to vaulting and are crowned by armorial 
bearings, richly carven at the points of intersection, 
and the white stone niches of the great screen are 
so richly adorned that they seem to fall about the 
gracious figures of the prophets and apostles like 
draperies of lace. 

The building was the undertaking of a lonely 
woman who tried thus to fill in the spaces of life 
when all was fled that had meant happiness. Mar- 
guerite of Bourbon, newly wedded to Philip of 
Savoy, saw her husband, in the first year of their 
married life, brought in from the hunt dead. In 
those days, doubtless, it was more difficult than 
now to deaden sorrow with activity. Marguerite, 
however, vowed to build a monastery and a chapel 
where incessant prayer should be offered for her 

295 



THE HUMAN WAY 



dead husband's soul. It was Marguerite of Austria 
who married Philibert the beautiful, the son of 
the first Marguerite, who, in her own widowhood, 
finally accomplished the vow, raised the beautiful 
walls of Brou, and inside built the three wonderful 
tombs for her husband, her mother-in-law and her- 
self. Exquisite as are the stalls, wrought in that 
age when wood-carving was at its height, it is these 
tombs, conceived with such profound feeling, that 
are the chief interest of the whole building. 

Nothing about this inaccessible little church 
touches one more than the thought that all its 
beauty and gay grace were the outgrowth of sor- 
row and loneliness — one of those fugitive things 
used to fill up the days of a life emptied of delight. 
Fugitive and forced, doubtless, the building seemed 
to its founder, but this is the service of sorrow, 
that it builds a concrete beauty in the world which 
shall outlive the sufferer. The satisfied soul has 
enough to do with enjoyment of the moments as 
they pass, but it is the broken-hearted, those who 
seek a refuge from themselves and from memory, 
who create beauty for posterity. 

Nor is it at white heat that one shall know emo- 
tion's worth, but when at white heat the hammer 
is applied, to shape the heart and the file is used 
to take away the evil and the vanity and the petti- 

296 



BUILDING 



ness, then in the silence and the listening of the 
after-years we shall come to know what the worth 
of our agony was. And perhaps this little island 
of life shall then seem no more than a casual, ex- 
perimental stopping-place along the slopes of being, 
where we find ourselves at nightly halt in the long 
march of growth, seeking for food and shelter while 
we look for the opening of the trail along some 
farther away. Surely we may assert, that is no 
adequate embodiment which comes into being and 
passes out ; to rebel against the passing is as futile 
as to rebel against the halt. It is all beyond us. 
But one thing remains in our own hands, the will, 
the courage with which, while we remain, we carry 
on the task of making beautiful this halting-place. 
Let the world drop to ashes about us and we turn 
but the more resolutely into ourselves and deter- 
mine while we linger to give ourselves to more 
enlightened action, more continuous creation, to 
endowing space with matters fair to contemplate. 
And what a wonder of heroism, after all, is man, 
living with the odds apparently so against him, 
with so rough a course to run, and no surety given 
for either past or future, yet stopping to be- 
think himself of mercy, justice, hope and trust. 
''Indeed I entreat you," wrote William Morris to 
a friend in the thick of the shadows, '' to think that 

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THE HUMAN WAY 



life is not empty nor made for nothing, but that 
the parts of it fit into one another in some strange 
way, and that the world goes on beautiful, and 
strange and dreadful and worshipful." 

Even so may man make life, beautiful and strange 
and dreadful and worshipful. UnresentfuUy he ac- 
cepts the mystery, hopefully he determines that 
the sojourn in this maze shall be no ruined thing, 
but a fine upbuilding. He has even laid to heart, 
in the deepest grief, the beautiful wisdom of mak- 
ing his beloved dead **a part and parcel of the 
living wisdom of all things." 

And then, before death takes him, he does one 
more service to nature, one final act of submission 
and acquiescence. Man has carefully builded up 
life with its strange contradictions, using pain and 
sorrow and effort for the transformation, then hav- 
ing understood its purpose, having made it beauti- 
ful to live, of his own free will, he takes out the 
shears and cuts the bonds that hold him to what 
he has wrought. 

Detachment is a word we come upon continually 
in the older books of devotion. What does it mean 
but the final form of earthly life, the end of con- 
flict? It means that those who have suffered and 
overcome, borne and acquiesced, transformed the 
personal till it fell in with the universal will, now 

298 



ACQUIESCENCE 



of their own accord, lift up the cup of personality 
and make the final renunciation of the self. I take 
it the power which manifests itself in conscious- 
ness is only a different form of the power which 
manifests itself outs^^'de consciousness, and so to 
stretch the limits and boundaries of personal con- 
sciousness as in some measure to recall and identify 
ourselves with the larger consciousness outside, is 
to make for detachment. That state of mind leads 
to detachment which quells the desire for personal 
and separate importance or happiness. The world 
is full of lovely words about it. "A heart at leis- 
ure from itself," the hymn quaintly and beauti- 
fully calls it. And many centuries back, an older 
hymn says: 

"Go out — God will go in; 

Die thou — and let Him live; 
Be not — and He will be, 

Wait and He'll all things give." 

The larger life, the fuller hopes, the deeper 
thoughts can come only to those who do not cling 
to the smaller scope. Vices shrink the limitations 
of personality. Great sins and passions are a mo- 
mentary narrowing by those capable of greater out- 
look. Repentance is the realisation of one's larger 
self and seeing the barriers we have built. 

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THE HUMAN WAY 



The limitations of the self are not fixed. A man 
may, at any unexpected point in time, suddenly 
shoot out beyond time and beyond human con- 
siderations, and the sign of breaking down the 
hedges of the self is not so much indifference as a 
trustful and joyous acquiescence in the whole. 
Suso says: *Xast then a joyous glance into thyself 
and see how God plays His play of love with the 
loving soul." And: ''Words cannot tell the man- 
ner in which those persons dwell in God who have 
really detached themselves from the world, and 
the way to attain this detachment is to die to the 
self and to maintain unruffled patience with all 
men" — a state of mind not only attained by great 
saints but also by sages, seers, geniuses, and by 
great sinners who have repented. For when one 
considers the power of suffering to enlarge and 
deepen consciousness and to free a man from sel- 
fish self-gratulation, one understands too how the 
sinner who is victor stands very near the saint. 

It seems almost paradoxical to say that the 
essence of detachment is to live in the present 
moment rather than in the past or the future, and 
only when one stops to realise that the moment is 
eternity and eternity is all in the moment, does one 
reach the thought that detachment is giving the 
highest quality to the moments as they pass, with- 

300 



BREAKING BONDS 



out lingering fondness for that which seems to have 
fled or yearning for that which may be. For de- 
tachment from the human way of looking drills 
us into the sense that the now contains the all, 
and that separation into times is limitation. We 
have all that we are. And the thought at the in- 
stant of reflective consciousness is what we are. 
Some degree of detachment is almost always at- 
tained by the dying. Very often, in watching 
them, we note a strange preoccupation, an aloof- 
ness and a peace difficult to comprehend. It is 
one of the mercies of life that this form of detach- 
ment seems to come even to those least prepared 
for laying aside the personal life with the dissolution 
of the body. We notice it often in cases of sudden 
and unexpected death ; some little act, some mood 
or word before the final separation of body and 
consciousness, indicates, however crudely, the will 
to offer up the self. ''Does he still care to see 
people?*' one asked of a dying man who had had 
through life the widest of sympathetic and intel- 
lectual interests. And the answer came, '' He seems 
very far away. He lies silent for hours smiling. 
If you speak to him, he answers, but he seems to 
have forgotten all that he once cared for." 

But it is not in the dying alone that we watch 
for this spirit. As in the olden times where there 

301 



THE HUMAN WAY 



were declared saints, so now, when one crosses the 
horizon of our experience, the distinguishing mark 
is still the same: he is detached. In all that he 
does or says, he is preoccupied with something be- 
yond himself. Whatever it is he is accomplishing, 
he does not expect individually to profit by it. It 
is always an aim beyond the personal life, some- 
thing larger, fuller, more lasting; it may be the 
founding of an order, the welfare of a community, 
the betterment of the social system or the progress 
of the race. It may merely mean that whatever 
the calling in life, however humble, it is fulfilled 
with a fine and accurate sense for fidelity and sac- 
rifice which submerges the personality and lifts the 
service. And, again, in old age wherever this is 
anything but a pitiable decay, the spirit of detach- 
ment is present. If a man live long enough the 
vision rarely fails him. Beyond the petty bicker- 
ings and little irritations of the daily round which 
have all lost their insistent power, the octogenarian 
sees and knows the other world, the impersonal life. 
Detachment contains a strange negation, older 
than Buddha and reiterated in thousands of various 
forms through all religions and all the philosophies 
of man. If, to the Western consciousness, there 
seems to be something mournful in the Hindoo form 
of expressing the renouncement of the will to live, 

302 



THE BADGE OF THE CHRISTIAN 

and something almost depraved in Schopenhauer's 
reiteration of it, we have the same creed expressed 
in another form for the more active Western in- 
telligence — ^lose your life and you shall have it — 
sell all that you have and give to the poor and you 
shall have everlasting life. Nor can we overlook 
the fact that philosophers and scientists, the pro- 
foundly learned wherever they may be, seem to 
have attained to the impersonal life, to a complete 
break from the desires and habits of animal man, 
without which detachment life is a mere illusion 
and slow death. Great learning, as well as great 
piety, is peaceful, unself-seeking and unself-con- 
scious. It is without point to prove, or desire for 
any given result. It has a disinterested love of 
truth, as the religious may have a disinterested 
love of goodness. Attainment is the offering up 
of the cup of consciousness to that which is be- 
yond the grasp and the scope of mortality. 

The fruit of the Christian life, wherever it is 
sincere, shows in some degree, however low, the 
same spirit. The confidence that it is not all of 
life to live nor all of death to die, the pushing off 
farther and farther of the goal to be attained, 
subdues the greed of man, his attempt to get 
enough out of this short three-score years and ten. 
It robs a man, too, of the oppressing melancholy 

303 



THE HUMAN WAY 



which results from a contemplation of the mutabil- 
ity of all things, the haunting spirit of regret that 
all things pass and nothing abides. Since this 
ceaseless changing in mortal life is but the fleeting 
foretaste of all that shall come in stability, ampli- 
tude and perfection, then the hopeless clinging to 
the present may pass and give place to a real 
delight in the feeling that all that is worth a man's 
love is infinite, for love is creative even as hatred 
is annihilating, and the faintest stirring of love is 
an ever-recurrent act of creation bringing more 
fully into existence that for which we felt the 
throb. 

So, having builded a life out of the materials laid 
at our hands, may we not with all faith and courage 
and acquiescence accept the close of mortal life 
and power and willingly lay aside this faulty mor- 
tal tool that we have used ? It may be difficult to 
state what we look to hereafter, or what form of 
lasting consciousness would seem conceivable; but 
because during all our earthly years we have paid 
toll to the underlying ideal, shall we not let the same 
impulse stretch beyond mortality? Vaguely, in- 
distinctly, we hear the call that summons us ; blind- 
ly, uncertainly, we move forward with arms out- 
stretched toward the goal; and as in life, under 
long sentence of death, we have gone forward build- 

304 



THE FINAL CHALLENGE 



ing our thwarted hopes into beauty, so once again 
we offer up the last of our mortality and go out 
into the mystery, gladly accepting the challenge 
of the heroic. 

20 



THE END 



